[ntp:hackers] Cold, dark world

David L. Mills mills at udel.edu
Wed Jan 25 21:35:37 UTC 2006


Guys,

I've been pilloried about the anal retentiveness of our campus mail 
system and attachments. Read on. The combined ECE and CIS department 
mail server sees about 40,000 attempted SNTP connections per day. Of 
these, 10,000 result in a SMTP connection. Of these, our campus 
virus/spam/attachment filters toss out all but 2500 messages. Of these, 
I get 700-1000 messages to my own mailbox. My mail recipies, which are 
based on subject and from fields toss out all but about fifty. Of these 
I manually toss out all but a handful. Now, on the dubious assumption 
one-third of those 40,000 attempts are directed at me, the eyeball 
survival is about ten blinks in 12,000 each day.

I've been watching brute-force ssh attacks, which go on almost 
continuously. The question is not how frequently they occur, but how 
many are attacking at the same time on the same machine. We get 
thousands of port indexers each day on all subnets, even on the backroom 
machines over the ISDN link.

Yeah, I know some of you probably have similar experiences. It's a cold, 
dark world out here.

Dave



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