Yup, On 23-Sep-01 Kurt Seifried wrote:
No, his box crashed because he was allowing it to engage in illegal activity.
You may want to take a business class that deals with liability.
I have a right to do anything I want with a malicious connection made to my machine, EVEN sending it a ton of viri, but Labrea does not do that, it just keeps on hanging on.
No, no you do not.
While there are laws regarding things like home intruders and the use of deadly force for example in some countries there are no laws AFAIK making it ok to attack people back online. IF you know of laws allowing such behaviour in a country I would love to know about it.
You have perhaps a more effective solution?
Yes. firewall it. Do not send anything back.
$0.02: if I may jump in here - without any intention to prolong the discussion about paragraphs and legit/illicit active responses to attacks - Nimda exploits bugs in an operating system (Win), and its effectiveness stems from bugs brought to you by Microsoft, from things like ignorance, misinformation or just laziness from admins and/or from home users who don't care much for their system's health. Patches are available, antivirus tools are available, too, people running vulnerable Win installations just need to read a thing or two and can then proceed to update their systems in order to be safe from Nimda, Code Red and its relatives. A matter of information, as usual. By counterattacking Nimda/Code Red-infected boxen you will gain nothing, just another down'ed box, several aggravated admins/users, a possible law suit and more bits of fun. The key is information about Nimda, about MS bugs and how to plug these holes; counterattacking is counter-productive, as it may put the focus on your attacks, not the very problem itself: The virus/worm. Counterattacks are like Aspirine - they cure your personal headaches, but do nothing good to the system. It's protection of systems we're talking about in here, not destruction.
J.Andersen
-Kurt
Boris Lorenz