Hello!

A machine I manage remotely for a friend comes under a distributed ssh break-in attack every once in a while. Annoyed (and alarmed) by the messages like:

Aug 12 10:21:17 symbion sshd[4333]: Invalid user mythtv from 85.234.158.180
Aug 12 10:21:18 symbion sshd[4335]: Invalid user mythtv from 85.234.158.180
Aug 12 10:21:20 symbion sshd[4337]: Invalid user mythtv from 85.234.158.180
Aug 12 10:21:21 symbion sshd[4339]: Invalid user mythtv from 85.234.158.180

I wrote an awk-script, which adds a block of the attacking IP-address to the ipfw-rules after three such "invalid user" attempts with:

   ipfw add 550 deny ip from ip

The script is fed by syslogd directly -- through a syslog.conf rule ("|/opt/sbin/auth-log-watch").

Once in a while I manually flush these rules... I this a good (safe) reaction? I'm asking, because the machine (currently running 7.0 as of July 7) hangs solid once every few weeks... My only guess is that a spike in attacks causes "too many" ipfw-entries created, which paralyzes the kernel due to some bug -- the machine is running natd and is the gateway for the rest of the network... The hangs could, of course, be caused by something else entirely, but my self-defense mechanism is my first suspect...

Any comments? Thanks!

   -mi

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