RE: What to do if they ignore you

["David Gillett" <gillettdavid () fhda edu>]

  Several people have assumed that these "probes" are not "attacks".
I see nothing in your description to warrant this assumption; the
persistence and the fact that the traffic seems to be local to a 
particular /16 sounds to me very like one of the worms that spreads
via CIFS (with weak/missing passwords).

  I do, however, concur that there is very little you can do about 
a network block whose admins ignore legitimate complaints, except 
attempt to escalate to their upstream provider.  There's a chance 
that this is also your customers' upstream provider, and that they
can be motivated to avoid a recommendation that those customers take
their business elsewhere....
  Oh, and generally networks shouldn't accept 445/CIFS traffic from 
the Internet -- block it and move along.

David Gillett


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Skip Carter [mailto:skip () taygeta com]
> Sent: Wednesday, April 13, 2005 10:30 AM
> To: incidents () securityfocus com
> Subject: What to do if they ignore you
>
>
>
> Hello,
>
> My company provides outsource security management/monitoring services.
>
> In early March we noticed that several of our clients that are in the
> same /16 block were getting persistent port 445 probes from a couple
> of systems from a very large corporation's satellite office which is
> on the same /16 block.
>
> I have repeatedly called the companies security manager (on 
> the US east
> coast) and talked to people at the companies headquarters (on the US
> west coast).  They take my information (I have shown them 
> firewall logs,
> IDS logs, captured packet traces, and honeypot sessions) but 
> nothing is
> done about these probes (typically around 1500/day).
>
> We have black-holed connections from the offending network 
> block, but many
> of our clients are small and do not have firewalls with the 
> resources to
> handle huge lists of blacklisted networks.
>
> It has been over a month now, and nothing has changed.  They 
> seem to be
> unable or unwilling to fix their own systems when they have all the
> information they could ask for in order to track the problem down.
>
> Does anybody have any suggestions on what to do to make Goliath behave
> when you are David ?
>
>
> -- 
>  Dr. Everett (Skip) Carter           Phone: 831-641-0645 FAX: 
>  831-641-0647
>  Taygeta Network Security Services   email: skip () taygeta net
>  1340 Munras Ave., Suite 314         WWW: http://www.taygeta.net/
>  Monterey, CA. 93940            

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