Re: my site is being attacked by Micorosoft proxy servers

Do a whois on the domain name for the organizations (ie, if its
proxy.foo.company.com, do a whois on company.com) and then try telephoning
the contacts there.  If that fails, do an nslookup or the like on their
domain and see if the people providing NS services for them provide an easy
clue to who their network provider or close associates are.  Do a whois on
them and call them. etc.  Contact your local ISP to see if they can help. 

In the mean time, configure your router/firewall/host to bounce their
packets.  If you want to be nice and have the technical capability, you could
just bounce the initial SYN to start a web session.  If not, you could bounce
all packets from that host or, if necessary, even from a range of IP numbers. 
If you think they are malicious, you might consider black-holing them instead
of bouncing them back. 

If serious abuse continues after you give them good notice, ultimately, 
you might consider getting getting your lawyers involved, suing for 
damagers, getting a court order against them, etc.  But be warned that 
this path is stewn with peril.

Donald

 On Thu, 19 Sep 1996, Rob Hartill wrote:

> Date: Thu, 19 Sep 1996 02:19:15 +0100 (BST)
> From: Rob Hartill <robh@imdb.com>
> To: www-talk@w3.org
> Subject: my site is being attacked by Micorosoft proxy servers
> 
> 
> For weeks now my servers have been pounded by users of Microsoft
> brain-dead proxy server "MS-Catapult".
> 
> This wonderful network-friendly software has a horrible bug in it
> that lots of its users have managed to trigger, yet they've failed
> to notice it.
> 
> Multiple sites are hitting my servers over and over and over for the
> same URLs. All these requests come with the USER_AGENT MS-Catapult/0.9.
> The requests have a frequency of 1-60 seconds where 3-7 URLs (usually
> gifs) are requested together every N (1-60) seconds.
> 
> I've already hacked my Apache server to reject (403 Forbidden) all
> requests from MS-Catapult agents, but does that stop them coming?, no!;
> they're just as happy to request a hundred thousand times and be told
> "forbidden" a hundred thousand times. And these numbers are real, I've
> seen millions of requests from the various sites in the past few weeks.
> They're non-stop 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
> 
> I've sent multiple mail messages to Microsoft's postmaster. No 
> acknowledgement. I've sent mail to postmaster/root at the proxy server
> sites, again no acknowledgement, and no let up in the barrage of
> requests.
> 
> Is there someone out there who can point me at the developers of
> MS-Catapult?
> 
> The situation gets worse with time as more and more proxies return to
> the site and get into this infinite loop. I've spent far too many days
> cleaning up the mess and it's not fair on the legitimate users of the
> site that access times are worsened because the proxies are using up
> the resources.
> 
> Attached is a patch for Apache (1.1.1 or higher) that I now use to
> block MS-Catapult. It is used by adding (to access.conf)
> 
> <Location />
>   <Limit GET>
>   order allow,deny
>   allow from all
>   deny from user-agents MS-Catapult
>   </Limit>
> </Location>
> 
> it doesn't stop the requests flooding in, but it does stop the proxies
> from grabbing larger files or running scripts.
> 
> If you are using MS-Catapult, please consider switching it off until
> Microsoft acknowledge the problem and offer a fix. If you don't, your
> proxy will probably waste more network resources that it is supposed to
> be saving.
> 
> -- 
> Rob Hartill (robh@imdb.com)    
> http://www.imdb.com/  ... why wait for a clear night to see the stars?.
> 
> 
>        ========================================================
> 
> *** mod_access.c.orig	Tue Sep 10 12:11:48 1996
> --- mod_access.c	Tue Sep 10 13:11:34 1996
> ***************
> *** 178,183 ****
> --- 178,194 ----
>       for (i = 0; i < a->nelts; ++i) {
>           if (!(mmask & ap[i].limited))
>   	    continue;
> +         if (ap[i].from && !strcmp(ap[i].from, "user-agents")) {
> +            char * this_agent = table_get(r->headers_in, "User-Agent");
> + 	   int j;
> + 
> +            if (!this_agent) return 0;
> + 
> +            for (j = i+1; j < a->nelts; ++j) {
> +               if (strstr(this_agent, ap[j].from)) return 1;
> +            }
> +            return 0;
> +         }
>   	if (!strcmp (ap[i].from, "all"))
>   	    return 1;
>   	if (!gothost)
> 
> 
> 

=====================================================================
Donald E. Eastlake 3rd     +1 508-287-4877(tel)     dee@cybercash.com
   318 Acton Street        +1 508-371-7148(fax)     dee@world.std.com
Carlisle, MA 01741 USA     +1 703-620-4200(main office, Reston, VA)
http://www.cybercash.com           http://www.eff.org/blueribbon.html

Received on Thursday, 19 September 1996 08:25:08 UTC