James C. Durham wrote:
On Friday 29 August 2003 04:23 am, paul wrote:

James C. Durham wrote:

It turned out that we had several Windows boxes in the building that had
been infected with the Nachi worm. This causes some kind of DOS or ping
probe out onto the internet and the local LAN.

Removing the inside interface's ethernet cable caused the ping times on
the outside interface to go back to the normal .4 milliseconds to the
router.

Apparently, the blast of packets coming from the infected boxes managed
to cause a "live lock" condition in the server. I assume it was interrupt
bound servicing the inside interface. The packets were ICMP requests to
various addresses.

I could be way off here, but is there any way to isolate machines that send a sudden blast of packets, either by destination address (make a firewall rule that drops those packets) or working out their MAC addresses and dropping their connectivity? Or scan for open ports and block unsecured systems from connecting?


What I did was go in the switch room and look for pulsing lights on the switch ports and pull the cables. That fixed it, but after much agony.

well, that's a bit draconian, but effective ;-)


My questions is.. what, if any, is a technique for preventing this
condition? I know, fix the windows boxes, but  I can't continually check
the status of the virus software and patch level of the Windows boxes.
There are 250 plus of them and one of me. Users won't install upgrades
even when warned this worm thing was coming. But, i'd like to prevent
loss of service when one of Bill's boxes goes nuts!

Where I work, at the University of Washington, the network staff were dropping as many as 200 machines *per day* off the network. If a machine was found to have an open RPC port (we run an open network), that was enough to get your network access cut off.

I realize these are political solutions more than technical ones,
but they may be of some use.


The trouble with that is that my users are largely untechnical and wouldn't have a clue what RPC is and cutting them off is not an option. Welcome to the world of corporate IT! It ain't a pretty job, but it pays the bills...

been there, done that, the bruises have gone down now . . .


One guy to 250 users is a bad ratio.

It seems like there should be some centralized, ie, rule-based controls you can put in place. And you should have some leverage to force autoupdates on those client machines.

I got the impression from some reading on Google Groups that there may be a way to tell the xl driver to use polling. I just don't know how.

Well, this is the right place to ask.


--
Paul Beard
<http://paulbeard.no-ip.org/movabletype/>
whois -h whois.networksolutions.com ha=pb202

Receiving a million dollars tax free will make you feel better than
being flat broke and having a stomach ache.
                -- Dolph Sharp, "I'm O.K., You're Not So Hot"

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