Re: Are botnets relevant to NANOG?

2006-05-30 Thread Michael . Dillon

 for this community would trend analysis with the best of who is getting 
 better and the worst of who is getting worse and some baseline counts be 

 enough for this group to understand if the problem is getting better.

Your 5-day numbers were very reminiscent of the
weekly CIDR report. I think that if you clean it
up for weekly submission then that would be 
useful to some. 

For instance, you only published data for two
categories of ASN. Where is the tier-1 data?
And numbers should cover a 7-day period, not
5 days. In addition, for each category you should
provide a fixed cutoff. The CIDR report shows
the top 30 ASNs. 

I think that the ideal would be a table 
including ASN category as one column and showing
the top 50 ASNs. In addition, you should attempt
to separate the dynamic addresses by some means 
or other and either add that as a separate column
or else do a separate table. Since this would
be posted weekly over a long period of time, it
is best to put some thought into how to structure
it so it remains relevant. 

Also, provide a URL where researchers can download
more complete datasets, not just top 50.

 I am suggesting that NANOG is an appropriate forum to publish general 
 stats on who the problem is getting better/worse for and possibly why 
 things got better/worse.

I think few people will complain about a weekly
posting of this nature.

--Michael Dillon




Re: Are botnets relevant to NANOG?

2006-05-30 Thread Michael . Dillon

 The motive is unclear because attacking,
 for example, root servers, is an effort without some obvious economic
 incentive

Since when is advertising NOT a sign of
an obvious economic incentive?

 The DA report went through a large thread(s) to post statistics here
 and I'm not sure why yours will be any better, or, just another set
 of statistics which further de-sensitizes everyone to the problem. 

Stats by themselves can be boring. But making data
available regularly and publicly will inevitably
lead to some people doing analyses of this data and
presenting those analyses to NANOG meetings. This will
lead to wider understanding of what is going on and
will provide raw material for getting management support
for actions to solve the problem.

--Michael Dillon



Re: Are botnets relevant to NANOG?

2006-05-30 Thread Valdis . Kletnieks
On Tue, 30 May 2006 10:02:37 BST, [EMAIL PROTECTED] said:

 For instance, you only published data for two
 categories of ASN. Where is the tier-1 data?

I suspect that tier-1 botnet data isn't at all interesting, because
in general, tier-1 providers have almost no address space containing
the sort of machines that end up in botnets.  For instance, look at AS701

http://www.cidr-report.org/cgi-bin/as-report?as=AS701view=4637

Lots of /24's, but even if you add it all up, barely a single /9 if
that much *total*.  And I bet most of those /24's just have a handful
of routers on them.

 And numbers should cover a 7-day period, not
 5 days. In addition, for each category you should
 provide a fixed cutoff. The CIDR report shows
 the top 30 ASNs. 

If we're playing the shame game the way the CIDR report is, an
interesting metric might be bots divided by announced address space
(so for instance AS1312 would have it 6 or 10 bots(*) divided by its
2 /16s).  I wonder if the numbers for consumer broadband versus
universities will look significantly different when done that way.

(*) Yes, our AS isn't perfectly clean.  We've got a resnet in our
address space, where the best we can do is provide user education and
play whack-a-mole as we find them


pgpC6giRPe9N7.pgp
Description: PGP signature


Re: Are botnets relevant to NANOG?

2006-05-30 Thread Sean Donelan

On Fri, 26 May 2006, Gadi Evron wrote:
 I honestly want to know why a precise number matters? It will only be
 higher than our facts based upon our different observation points.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/30/us/30identity.html
  Credit card companies point to new monitoring systems that have reduced
  loss from fraud as a percentage of overall transaction volume. At Visa,
  fraud accounted for 7 cents per $100 in transactions, down from 18 cents
  per $100 in 1990. We could have a system reducing fraud to zero basis
  points, but it wouldn't meet what consumers are demanding, said Rosetta
  Jones, a Visa spokeswoman. We need to deliver what consumers want in a
  way that is secure.

Zero is probably a bit too optimistic, but the idea is the same.


Re: Are botnets relevant to NANOG?

2006-05-26 Thread Peter Dambier


[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

In recent discussions about botnets, some people maintained
that botnets (and viruses and worms) are really not a relevant
topic for NANOG discussion and are not something that we
should be worried about. I think that the CSI and FBI would 
disagree with that.




Some people need whatever bandwidth they can get for ranting.
Of course routing reports, virus reports and botnet bgp statistics
take away a lot of valuable bandwidth that could otherwise be used
for nagging. On the other hand without Gadi's howling for the
wolves those wolves might be lost species and without the wolves
all the nagging and ranting would make less fun.



Now NANOG members cannot change OS security, they can't
change corporate security practices, but they can have 
an impact on botnets because this is where the nefarious

activity meets the network.



They can. All you have to do is look for free software and
join the devellopers or the testers or report whatever you
have found out.

When working for Exodus and GLC I have seen I could change
security practices. I was working in London, Munich and
Frankfurt NOCs.

Sorry I did not know about NANOG that time. It would have
made my live a lot more interesting.

Therefore, I conclude that discussions of botnets do 
belong on the NANOG list as long as the NANOG list is

not used as a primary venue for discussing them.



Botnets are networks. We should have the network operators
on the NANOG list. (I am afraid we do already have them :)


One thing that surveys, such as the CSI/FBI Security
Survey, cannot do well is to measure the impact of 
botnet researchers and the people who attempt to shut

down botnets. It's similar to the fight against terrorism.
I know that there have been 2 terrorist attacks on
London since 9/11 but I don't know HOW MANY ATTACKS
HAVE BEEN THWARTED. At least two have been publicised 
but there could be dozens more.


Cleaning up botnets is rather like fighting terrorism.
At the end, you have nothing to show for it. No news
coverage, no big heaps of praise. Most people aren't
sure there was ever a problem to begin with. That doesn't
mean that the work should stop or that network providers
should withold their support for cleaning up the
botnet problem.



Maybe it is high time for a transparent frog. Invisible
for secure systems but as soon as one of the bots tries
to infect it, it will ...

In case you are not Gadi or working for Gadi, feel free
to ignore the tranparent frog. I have never met one :)

Cheers
Peter and Karin

--
Peter and Karin Dambier
Cesidian Root - Radice Cesidiana
Graeffstrasse 14
D-64646 Heppenheim
+49(6252)671-788 (Telekom)
+49(179)108-3978 (O2 Genion)
+49(6252)750-308 (VoIP: sipgate.de)
mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://iason.site.voila.fr/
https://sourceforge.net/projects/iason/



Re: Are botnets relevant to NANOG?

2006-05-26 Thread Rick Wesson




Some people need whatever bandwidth they can get for ranting.
Of course routing reports, virus reports and botnet bgp statistics
take away a lot of valuable bandwidth that could otherwise be used
for nagging. On the other hand without Gadi's howling for the
wolves those wolves might be lost species and without the wolves
all the nagging and ranting would make less fun.


lets see, should we be concerned? here are a few interesting tables, the 
cnt column is new IP addresses we have seen in the last 5 days. The 
first table is Tier-2 ASNs as classified by Fontas's ASN Taxonomy paper 
[1] The second table is Universities. The ASN concerned are just in the 
announced by orgs in USA as to imply that they should be on NANOG.


Let me say it again the counts are NEW observations in the last 5 days. 
also note I'm not Gati, and I've got much more data on everyones networks.


-rick


New compromised unique IP addresses (last 5 days) Tier-2 ASN
+---++---+
| asnum | asname | cnt   |
+---++---+
| 19262 | Verizon Internet Services  | 35790 |
| 20115 | Charter Communications |  4453 |
|  8584 | Barak AS   |  3930 |
|  5668 | CenturyTel Internet Holdings, Inc. |  2633 |
| 12271 | Road Runner|  2485 |
| 22291 | Charter Communications |  2039 |
|  8113 | VRIS Verizon Internet Services |  1664 |
|  6197 | BellSouth Network Solutions, Inc   |  1634 |
|  6198 | BellSouth Network Solutions, Inc   |  1531 |
|  9325 | XTRA-AS Telecom XTRA, Auckland |  1415 |
| 11351 | Road Runner|  1415 |
|  6140 | ImpSat |  1051 |
|  7021 | Verizon Internet Services  |   961 |
|  6350 | Verizon Internet Services  |   945 |
| 19444 | CHARTER COMMUNICATIONS |   845 |
+---++---+

Universities, new unique ip last 5 days
+---++-+
| asnum | left(asname,30)| cnt |
+---++-+
|14 | Columbia University|  93 |
| 3 | MIT-2 Massachusetts Institute  |  45 |
|73 | University of Washington   |  25 |
|  7925 | West Virginia Network for Educ |  24 |
|  4385 | RIT-3 Rochester Institute of T |  20 |
| 23369 | SCOE-5 Sonoma County Office of |  19 |
|  5078 | Oklahoma Network for Education |  18 |
|  3388 | UNM University of New Mexico   |  18 |
|55 | University of Pennsylvania |  13 |
|   159 | The Ohio State University  |  12 |
|   104 | University of Colorado at Boul |  12 |
|  4265 | CERFN California Education and |  11 |
|   693 | University of Notre Dame   |  10 |
|  2900 | Arizona Tri University Network |   9 |
|  2637 | Georgia Institute of Technolog |   9 |
+---++-+



[1] http://www.ece.gatech.edu/research/labs/MANIACS/as_taxonomy/


Re: Are botnets relevant to NANOG?

2006-05-26 Thread Fergie

I think the numbers speak for themselves.

- ferg



-- Rick Wesson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:



 Some people need whatever bandwidth they can get for ranting.
 Of course routing reports, virus reports and botnet bgp statistics
 take away a lot of valuable bandwidth that could otherwise be used
 for nagging. On the other hand without Gadi's howling for the
 wolves those wolves might be lost species and without the wolves
 all the nagging and ranting would make less fun.

lets see, should we be concerned? here are a few interesting tables, the 
cnt column is new IP addresses we have seen in the last 5 days. The 
first table is Tier-2 ASNs as classified by Fontas's ASN Taxonomy paper 
[1] The second table is Universities. The ASN concerned are just in the 
announced by orgs in USA as to imply that they should be on NANOG.

Let me say it again the counts are NEW observations in the last 5 days. 
also note I'm not Gati, and I've got much more data on everyones networks.

-rick


New compromised unique IP addresses (last 5 days) Tier-2 ASN
+---++---+
| asnum | asname | cnt   |
+---++---+
| 19262 | Verizon Internet Services  | 35790 |
| 20115 | Charter Communications |  4453 |
|  8584 | Barak AS   |  3930 |
|  5668 | CenturyTel Internet Holdings, Inc. |  2633 |
| 12271 | Road Runner|  2485 |
| 22291 | Charter Communications |  2039 |
|  8113 | VRIS Verizon Internet Services |  1664 |
|  6197 | BellSouth Network Solutions, Inc   |  1634 |
|  6198 | BellSouth Network Solutions, Inc   |  1531 |
|  9325 | XTRA-AS Telecom XTRA, Auckland |  1415 |
| 11351 | Road Runner|  1415 |
|  6140 | ImpSat |  1051 |
|  7021 | Verizon Internet Services  |   961 |
|  6350 | Verizon Internet Services  |   945 |
| 19444 | CHARTER COMMUNICATIONS |   845 |
+---++---+

Universities, new unique ip last 5 days
+---++-+
| asnum | left(asname,30)| cnt |
+---++-+
|14 | Columbia University|  93 |
| 3 | MIT-2 Massachusetts Institute  |  45 |
|73 | University of Washington   |  25 |
|  7925 | West Virginia Network for Educ |  24 |
|  4385 | RIT-3 Rochester Institute of T |  20 |
| 23369 | SCOE-5 Sonoma County Office of |  19 |
|  5078 | Oklahoma Network for Education |  18 |
|  3388 | UNM University of New Mexico   |  18 |
|55 | University of Pennsylvania |  13 |
|   159 | The Ohio State University  |  12 |
|   104 | University of Colorado at Boul |  12 |
|  4265 | CERFN California Education and |  11 |
|   693 | University of Notre Dame   |  10 |
|  2900 | Arizona Tri University Network |   9 |
|  2637 | Georgia Institute of Technolog |   9 |
+---++-+



[1] http://www.ece.gatech.edu/research/labs/MANIACS/as_taxonomy/


--
Fergie, a.k.a. Paul Ferguson
 Engineering Architecture for the Internet
 [EMAIL PROTECTED] or [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 ferg's tech blog: http://fergdawg.blogspot.com/



Re: Are botnets relevant to NANOG?

2006-05-26 Thread John Kristoff

On Fri, 26 May 2006 10:21:10 -0700
Rick Wesson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 lets see, should we be concerned? here are a few interesting tables,
 the cnt column is new IP addresses we have seen in the last 5 days.

Hi Rick,

What I'd be curious to know in the numbers being thrown around if there
has been any accounting of transient address usage.  Since I'm spending
an awful lot of time with DNS these days, I'll actually provide a cite
related to that (and not simply suggest you just quote me :-).  See
sections 3.3.2 and 4.4 of the following:

  Availability, Usage and Deployment Characteristics of the Domain Name
  System, Internet Measurement Conference 2004, J. Pang, et. al

At some point transient address pools are limited and presumably so
are the possible numbers of new bots, particularly within netblocks.
Is there any accounting for that?  Shouldn't there be?  What will the
effect of doing that be on the numbers?

John


Re: Are botnets relevant to NANOG?

2006-05-26 Thread Rick Wesson


John,

The short answer is no.

The longer answer is that we haven't found a reliable way to identify 
dynamic blocks. Should anyone point me to an authoritative source I'd be 
happy to do the analysis and provide some graphs on how dynamic 
addresses effect the numbers.


also note that we are using TCP fingerprinting in our spamtraps and 
expect to have some interesting results published in the august/sept 
time frame. We won't be able to say that a block is dynamic but we will 
be able to better understand if we talk to the same spammer from 
different ip addresses and how often those addresses change.


I believe that understanding our tcp fingerprinting of spam senders 
might be more interesting and relevant to NANOG than how dynamic address 
assignments discounts the numbers i posted earlier.




-rick

John Kristoff wrote:

On Fri, 26 May 2006 10:21:10 -0700
Rick Wesson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:


lets see, should we be concerned? here are a few interesting tables,
the cnt column is new IP addresses we have seen in the last 5 days.


Hi Rick,

What I'd be curious to know in the numbers being thrown around if there
has been any accounting of transient address usage.  Since I'm spending
an awful lot of time with DNS these days, I'll actually provide a cite
related to that (and not simply suggest you just quote me :-).  See
sections 3.3.2 and 4.4 of the following:

  Availability, Usage and Deployment Characteristics of the Domain Name
  System, Internet Measurement Conference 2004, J. Pang, et. al

At some point transient address pools are limited and presumably so
are the possible numbers of new bots, particularly within netblocks.
Is there any accounting for that?  Shouldn't there be?  What will the
effect of doing that be on the numbers?

John




Re: Are botnets relevant to NANOG?

2006-05-26 Thread John Kristoff

On Fri, 26 May 2006 11:50:21 -0700
Rick Wesson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 The longer answer is that we haven't found a reliable way to identify 
 dynamic blocks. Should anyone point me to an authoritative source I'd
 be happy to do the analysis and provide some graphs on how dynamic 
 addresses effect the numbers.

I don't know how effective the dynamic lists maintained by some in
the anti-spamming community is, you'd probably know better than I,
but that is one way as decribed in the paper.  In the first section
of the paper I cited they lists three methods they used to try to
capture stable IP addresses.  Summarizing those:

  1. reverse map the IP address and analyze the hostname
  2. do same for nearby addresses and analyze character difference ratio
  3. compare active probes of suspect app with icmp echo response

None of these will be foolproof and the last one will probably only
be good for cases where there is a service running where'd you'd
rather there not be and you can test for it (e.g. open relays).

There was at least one additional reference to related work in that
paper, which leads to more still, but I'll let those interested to
do their own research on additional ideas for themselves.

 also note that we are using TCP fingerprinting in our spamtraps and 
 expect to have some interesting results published in the august/sept 
 time frame. We won't be able to say that a block is dynamic but we
 will be able to better understand if we talk to the same spammer from 
 different ip addresses and how often those addresses change.

Will look forward to seeing more.  Thanks,

John


Re: Are botnets relevant to NANOG?

2006-05-26 Thread Peter Dambier


John Kristoff wrote:

On Fri, 26 May 2006 11:50:21 -0700
Rick Wesson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:


The longer answer is that we haven't found a reliable way to identify 
dynamic blocks. Should anyone point me to an authoritative source I'd
be happy to do the analysis and provide some graphs on how dynamic 
addresses effect the numbers.



I don't know how effective the dynamic lists maintained by some in
the anti-spamming community is, you'd probably know better than I,
but that is one way as decribed in the paper.  In the first section
of the paper I cited they lists three methods they used to try to
capture stable IP addresses.  Summarizing those:

  1. reverse map the IP address and analyze the hostname
  2. do same for nearby addresses and analyze character difference ratio
  3. compare active probes of suspect app with icmp echo response


Tool to help you.
Try natnum form the IASON tools.

 $ natnum echnaton.serveftp.com

host_look(84.167.246.104,echnaton.serveftp.com,1420293736).
host_name(84.167.246.104,p54A7F668.dip.t-dialin.net).

You can feed natnum a hostname or an ip-address or even a long integer.

If you want to dump an address range use name2pl.

 $ name2pl 84.167.246.100 8

host_name(84.167.246.100,p54A7F664.dip.t-dialin.net).
host_name(84.167.246.101,p54A7F665.dip.t-dialin.net).
...
host_name(84.167.246.106,p54A7F66A.dip.t-dialin.net).
host_name(84.167.246.107,p54A7F66B.dip.t-dialin.net).

Dumps you 8 ip-addresses starting from 84.167.246.100.
Without the 8 you will get 256

http://iason.site.voila.fr/
http://www.kokoom.com/

Sorry the sourceforge still gives me hickups :)
Sorry will compile and run on UNIX, BSD, Linux, MAC OS-X only.



None of these will be foolproof and the last one will probably only
be good for cases where there is a service running where'd you'd
rather there not be and you can test for it (e.g. open relays).

There was at least one additional reference to related work in that
paper, which leads to more still, but I'll let those interested to
do their own research on additional ideas for themselves.


also note that we are using TCP fingerprinting in our spamtraps and 
expect to have some interesting results published in the august/sept 
time frame. We won't be able to say that a block is dynamic but we
will be able to better understand if we talk to the same spammer from 
different ip addresses and how often those addresses change.



Will look forward to seeing more.  Thanks,

John


Kind regards
Peter and Karin

--
Peter and Karin Dambier
Cesidian Root - Radice Cesidiana
Graeffstrasse 14
D-64646 Heppenheim
+49(6252)671-788 (Telekom)
+49(179)108-3978 (O2 Genion)
+49(6252)750-308 (VoIP: sipgate.de)
mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://iason.site.voila.fr/
https://sourceforge.net/projects/iason/



Re: Are botnets relevant to NANOG?

2006-05-26 Thread Sean Donelan

On Fri, 26 May 2006, John Kristoff wrote:
 What I'd be curious to know in the numbers being thrown around if there
 has been any accounting of transient address usage.  Since I'm spending

I worked with Adlex to update their software to identify and track dynamic
addresses associated with subscriber RADIUS information.  At the time,
Adlex (now CompuWare) was the only off-the-shelf software that matched
unique subscriber RADIUS instead of just IP address. It is behavior based,
so not absolutely 100% accurate, but it is useful for long term trending
bot-like unique subscribers instead of dynamic IP addresses.  I presented
some public numbers at an NSP-SEC BOF.  There is a large difference
between the number of unique subscribers versus the number of dynamic IP
addresses detected by various public detectors.

http://www.compuware.com/products/vantage/4920_ENG_HTML.htm



Re: Are botnets relevant to NANOG?

2006-05-26 Thread Peter Dambier


Sean Donelan wrote:

On Fri, 26 May 2006, John Kristoff wrote:


What I'd be curious to know in the numbers being thrown around if there
has been any accounting of transient address usage.  Since I'm spending



I worked with Adlex to update their software to identify and track dynamic
addresses associated with subscriber RADIUS information.  At the time,
Adlex (now CompuWare) was the only off-the-shelf software that matched
unique subscriber RADIUS instead of just IP address. It is behavior based,
so not absolutely 100% accurate, but it is useful for long term trending
bot-like unique subscribers instead of dynamic IP addresses.  I presented
some public numbers at an NSP-SEC BOF.  There is a large difference
between the number of unique subscribers versus the number of dynamic IP
addresses detected by various public detectors.

http://www.compuware.com/products/vantage/4920_ENG_HTML.htm


Just an afterthought, traceroute and take the final router. I guess for
aDSL home users you will find some 8 or 11 routers in germany. My final
router never changes. Of course there can hide more than one bad guy
behind that router.

Kind regards
Peter and Karin

--
Peter and Karin Dambier
Cesidian Root - Radice Cesidiana
Graeffstrasse 14
D-64646 Heppenheim
+49(6252)671-788 (Telekom)
+49(179)108-3978 (O2 Genion)
+49(6252)750-308 (VoIP: sipgate.de)
mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://iason.site.voila.fr/
https://sourceforge.net/projects/iason/



Re: Are botnets relevant to NANOG?

2006-05-26 Thread Fergie

Not effective against botnets.

Think of it this way, thousands of compromised hosts (zombies),
distributed to the four corners of the Internet, hundreds (if
not thousands) of AS's -- all recieving their instructions via
IRC from a CC server somewhere, that probably also may change
due to dynamic DNS, or pump-and-dump domain registrations, or
any other various ways to continually move the CC.

Simply going after (what may _seem_to_be_) the last-hop router
is like swinging a stick after a piñata that you can't actually
reach when you are blind-folded. :-)

- ferg


-- Peter Dambier [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

Just an afterthought, traceroute and take the final router. I guess for
aDSL home users you will find some 8 or 11 routers in germany. My final
router never changes. Of course there can hide more than one bad guy
behind that router.

[snip]


--
Fergie, a.k.a. Paul Ferguson
 Engineering Architecture for the Internet
 [EMAIL PROTECTED] or [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 ferg's tech blog: http://fergdawg.blogspot.com/



Re: Are botnets relevant to NANOG?

2006-05-26 Thread Rick Wesson


for this community would trend analysis with the best of who is getting 
better and the worst of who is getting worse and some baseline counts be 
enough for this group to understand if the problem is getting better.


I am suggesting that NANOG is an appropriate forum to publish general 
stats on who the problem is getting better/worse for and possibly why 
things got better/worse.


I'd like to see a general head nod that there is a problem and develop 
some stats so we can understand if it is getting better or worse.




-rick


Fergie wrote:

Not effective against botnets.

Think of it this way, thousands of compromised hosts (zombies),
distributed to the four corners of the Internet, hundreds (if
not thousands) of AS's -- all recieving their instructions via
IRC from a CC server somewhere, that probably also may change
due to dynamic DNS, or pump-and-dump domain registrations, or
any other various ways to continually move the CC.

Simply going after (what may _seem_to_be_) the last-hop router
is like swinging a stick after a piñata that you can't actually
reach when you are blind-folded. :-)

- ferg


-- Peter Dambier [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

Just an afterthought, traceroute and take the final router. I guess for
aDSL home users you will find some 8 or 11 routers in germany. My final
router never changes. Of course there can hide more than one bad guy
behind that router.

[snip]


--
Fergie, a.k.a. Paul Ferguson
 Engineering Architecture for the Internet
 [EMAIL PROTECTED] or [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 ferg's tech blog: http://fergdawg.blogspot.com/





Re: Are botnets relevant to NANOG?

2006-05-26 Thread Martin Hannigan


At 07:09 PM 5/26/2006, Rick Wesson wrote:

for this community would trend analysis with the best of who is 
getting better and the worst of who is getting worse and some 
baseline counts be enough for this group to understand if the 
problem is getting better.


I am suggesting that NANOG is an appropriate forum to publish 
general stats on who the problem is getting better/worse for and 
possibly why things got better/worse.


I'd like to see a general head nod that there is a problem and 
develop some stats so we can understand if it is getting better or worse.





We all know there is a problem. Botnets/zombies/et. al. are the
number one threat to the infrastructure and the attacks may be deliberate or
they may be a distraction. The motive is unclear because attacking,
for example, root servers, is an effort without some obvious economic
incentive, at least that I can see. It doesn't make a lot of sense because
the conventional wisdom before they open recursive attacks was that
it was in the miscreants best interest to not attack infrastructure
so that it could facilitate their reachable goals.

The DA report went through a large thread(s) to post statistics here
and I'm not sure why yours will be any better, or, just another set
of statistics which further de-sensitizes everyone to the problem. I
mean, it looks like, all of a sudden, the DNS community has a big
problem with these open recursive attacks, ran off privately, and
have now determined that it's a feature, not a bug, and well, heck,
operators are now responsible. I am not saying that is the answer, but
I am saying I am reading the OARC comments and this is sort of what
it fees like. As much as Gadi seems to appropriate others credit,
Randy Vaugh and him have been doing this work for some time and
deserves some credit so I'd say have you spoken to them about how
to make their report better yet instead of create more.


-M








--
Martin Hannigan(c) 617-388-2663
Renesys Corporation(w) 617-395-8574
Member of Technical Staff  Network Operations
   [EMAIL PROTECTED]  



Re: Are botnets relevant to NANOG?

2006-05-26 Thread Rick Wesson



I am saying I am reading the OARC comments and this is sort of what
it fees like. As much as Gadi seems to appropriate others credit,
Randy Vaugh and him have been doing this work for some time and
deserves some credit so I'd say have you spoken to them about how
to make their report better yet instead of create more.


Yes, we have worked with Gati and Randy Vaugh; infact randy helped me 
out today; thanks randy!


There is a difference in how Randy/Gati collect data and how we collect 
data. The stuff we publish are from numerous dns based realtime 
blacklists and spam traps we run. Other folks black-hole botnets and 
capture data.


We both come up with a dataset that overlaps but we don't yet know by 
how much. So our data is another view using a different methodology and 
isn't supposed to be better but confirming of where the problem is and 
 estimates of its magnitude.



-rick




Re: Are botnets relevant to NANOG?

2006-05-26 Thread Gadi Evron

[top-posting]

Time differentials, time-limiting, proxies and NATs, dynamic addresses,
different malware, different OS, etc. are all things taken into acount. At
some point you just need to have a best guess..

When the situation was by far less horrible, the numbers still didn't
matter.

Wasn't it your countrymen who said why should you need to be able to
destroy the world a thousand times over when once is more than enough? I
think 3 times for redundancy sounds like fun.

The numbers are for years now not relevant. I often count active groups,
active attacks per time-frame, money made/lost and number of user ID's
compromised / sites targetted.

Gadi.

On Fri, 26 May 2006, John Kristoff wrote:

 
 On Fri, 26 May 2006 11:50:21 -0700
 Rick Wesson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 
  The longer answer is that we haven't found a reliable way to identify 
  dynamic blocks. Should anyone point me to an authoritative source I'd
  be happy to do the analysis and provide some graphs on how dynamic 
  addresses effect the numbers.
 
 I don't know how effective the dynamic lists maintained by some in
 the anti-spamming community is, you'd probably know better than I,
 but that is one way as decribed in the paper.  In the first section
 of the paper I cited they lists three methods they used to try to
 capture stable IP addresses.  Summarizing those:
 
   1. reverse map the IP address and analyze the hostname
   2. do same for nearby addresses and analyze character difference ratio
   3. compare active probes of suspect app with icmp echo response
 
 None of these will be foolproof and the last one will probably only
 be good for cases where there is a service running where'd you'd
 rather there not be and you can test for it (e.g. open relays).
 
 There was at least one additional reference to related work in that
 paper, which leads to more still, but I'll let those interested to
 do their own research on additional ideas for themselves.
 
  also note that we are using TCP fingerprinting in our spamtraps and 
  expect to have some interesting results published in the august/sept 
  time frame. We won't be able to say that a block is dynamic but we
  will be able to better understand if we talk to the same spammer from 
  different ip addresses and how often those addresses change.
 
 Will look forward to seeing more.  Thanks,
 
 John
 



Re: Are botnets relevant to NANOG?

2006-05-26 Thread Gadi Evron

On Fri, 26 May 2006, Peter Dambier wrote:
 
 Sean Donelan wrote:
  On Fri, 26 May 2006, John Kristoff wrote:
  
 What I'd be curious to know in the numbers being thrown around if there
 has been any accounting of transient address usage.  Since I'm spending
  
  
  I worked with Adlex to update their software to identify and track dynamic
  addresses associated with subscriber RADIUS information.  At the time,
  Adlex (now CompuWare) was the only off-the-shelf software that matched
  unique subscriber RADIUS instead of just IP address. It is behavior based,
  so not absolutely 100% accurate, but it is useful for long term trending
  bot-like unique subscribers instead of dynamic IP addresses.  I presented
  some public numbers at an NSP-SEC BOF.  There is a large difference
  between the number of unique subscribers versus the number of dynamic IP
  addresses detected by various public detectors.
  
  http://www.compuware.com/products/vantage/4920_ENG_HTML.htm
 
 Just an afterthought, traceroute and take the final router. I guess for
 aDSL home users you will find some 8 or 11 routers in germany. My final
 router never changes. Of course there can hide more than one bad guy
 behind that router.

Actually, some anti spam veterns keep lists of dynamic blocks as negative
scoring marks in their filters. I still believe that even ignoring those
the numbers are still too high.

I honestly want to know why a precise number matters? It will only be
higher than our facts based upon our different observation points.

Gadi.

 
 Kind regards
 Peter and Karin
 
 -- 
 Peter and Karin Dambier
 Cesidian Root - Radice Cesidiana
 Graeffstrasse 14
 D-64646 Heppenheim
 +49(6252)671-788 (Telekom)
 +49(179)108-3978 (O2 Genion)
 +49(6252)750-308 (VoIP: sipgate.de)
 mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 http://iason.site.voila.fr/
 https://sourceforge.net/projects/iason/
 



Re: Are botnets relevant to NANOG?

2006-05-26 Thread Gadi Evron

On Fri, 26 May 2006, Rick Wesson wrote:
 
  I am saying I am reading the OARC comments and this is sort of what
  it fees like. As much as Gadi seems to appropriate others credit,
  Randy Vaugh and him have been doing this work for some time and
  deserves some credit so I'd say have you spoken to them about how
  to make their report better yet instead of create more.
 
 Yes, we have worked with Gati and Randy Vaugh; infact randy helped me 
 out today; thanks randy!
 
 There is a difference in how Randy/Gati collect data and how we collect 
 data. The stuff we publish are from numerous dns based realtime 
 blacklists and spam traps we run. Other folks black-hole botnets and 
 capture data.
 
 We both come up with a dataset that overlaps but we don't yet know by 
 how much. So our data is another view using a different methodology and 
 isn't supposed to be better but confirming of where the problem is and 
   estimates of its magnitude.

The more we know, the better. I believe the time for action has come and
gone, but I was not born a pessimist. :)

If the first step is to de-classify what's public so that people are
aware of what's going on, I say bring it on.

Great work, Rick. Beer is on me this defcon.

Gadi.
 
 
 -rick