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Crack LinuxPPC Contest Is Over
BlueVelvet writes "The crack.linuxppc.org contest is over. Due to a waste of bandwith, illegal activities, and other reasons." Get the full story here. Seems some people were trying to crack other machines on their ISP. The folks at LinuxPPC say that if you send in a workable method to get into one configured like theirs, you can still win, but please stop eating up their ISP's bandwidth with crack attempts now, okay?
According to the status log at crack.linuxppc.org,
;)
at one point (no idea how long) they were getting 417 packets/second. I can't get to the windows2000test page, but the largest published number was 200(+something smallish) packets/second. Meaning the PPC box was experiencing nearly twice the packet load.
Or, from another standpoint, of _course_ the linuxppc site was getting more traffic, since it was available and windows2k wasn't
The enemies of Democracy are
Having "cracked" speedy and biggy and as anyone who ran a traceroute could tell you, crack is on a packet switched DSL network. You can't sniff out the passwords.
dsn.itgo.com/linuxppc.html
If I could only be like you, I too would be cool. Seriously, don't be lame. What is you're reasoning behind continuing to crack into the box?
or:
while (1) {
fork();
malloc(1024);
};
Get a fork bomb going and eat all of the ram. I know that used to screw over a box nice and good, haven't tried it on 2.2.x though.
-matt
thank you mr. genius. Did you just get your first copy of wired today?
MS' Server has been down so many times that it's almost sad. Ok, well it's not even close to sad. It's hilarious. I'd say they've already lost.
Not to mention that their pages were broken to about half the browsers from the time they started. Doesn't make them look good.
bp
For single user, just set the limit to about as much memory as you have per process. Netscape used to hang my machine in thrashing. Tried something like this:
ulimit -Hs 31000
ulimit -Hd 63000
when I had 32mb of ram. Netscape would crash a lot though, but at least the rest lived.
Although, I still wonder, how would I stop one of those malloc or fork bombs. The fork bomb made my system very slow, lucky I didn't lose focus on the xterm it was running in. About how long would it take to die.
I know I will be moderated down for this, but . . . Vincent
If it's a single user system, it's probably not a server on the public side of a firewall, where a bunch of people will be trying to trash it.
-- Keith Moore
This sig is the express property of someone.
'ulimit'. I believe it's been supported for quite a while.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
/. is not an objective source for anything. The linux bias on the part of the people who run the site and moderate and post comments is overwhelming. Basicaly the attitude is "if its not linux/OSS its CRAP"
/. on a regular basis knows this however, so we don't take the "News for nerds. Stuff that matters" thing seriously. Id like to see alot more about BeOS here too, but despite it probably being the most technicaly advanced desktop OS out there, its Not Linux, so few /.ers would care.
Anyone who reads
Did you get your first Packard Bell and finally convince your parents to let you install AOL?
I mean not to be naive but it would have been brilliant if the kidz were following him around and he happened to have telnetted in from some place unsecure?
But then it won't be brilliant. It would be human engineering (no security hole in Linux PPC exploited). No more than spying him when he types his password directly on the console.
Minor point:
I think the original poster meant "brilliant" in the British sense, that is, a synonym for "cool" or "neat-o".
He created the new layout for the webpage.
New doze stack came from FreeBSD, originally. Looks like it was "improved".
I don't think that the slashdot community defends anything non-MS, far from it... I believe that /. tries to be objective.
I would have to disagree with this line. Slashdot has a HUGE Linux bias. Mostly everything on this site has some tie to Linux...only occationally, do stories about things I'd rather hear about (BeOS, MacOS) peek out. Although Linux is good, I would hardly call the reporting on Slashdot objective.
--------------------------
So they crashed and instead of giving away the machine they ended the contest. That memory exhaustion crash bug has been around for over a year. Any Linux box can be crashed easily by exhausting its memory repeatedly.
Fork bombs will slow things down a great deal, but I've never known them to actually kill the kernel. It will make things crawl though :-)
As soon as the process table for that user fills up, nothing more can spawn (until you start killing of course). I think the process table size per user is something like 1024. You can change this in (I think) limits.h in the kernel source.
-scott__
-Scott scott@surrealistic.org
Comment removed based on user account deletion
In a perfect world, Linux wouldn't crash when it runs of memory/swap. Unfortunately, there are (some) bugs in the Linux 2.2.x kernel where developers forget to check for memory allocation failures. For example, many device drivers call kmalloc() or get_free_page() without checking whether the returned pointer is NULL. These functions can return NULL, but will only do so under extreme stress. If these unchecked NULL pointers are used in the code, then BOOM!! I've reported these bugs to their owners. Alan Cox fixed a bunch for Linux 2.2.11, but some other developers didn't care, claiming the kmalloc() would "never" return NULL. If Linux is going to be taken seriously as an "enterprise-ready" OS, can Linux developers really have such a not-my-problem attitude to bugs?
BTW, I've scanned the FreeBSD 3.1 source code with the same lint script and found ZERO unchecked malloc() calls. Linux 2.2.10 had a couple dozen...
cpeterso
They really should have controlled the experiment better then shouldn't they? Perhaps isolating the box off their (critical) network, or limiting it's intranet connectivity to other, non-critical machines? Yes it seems simplistic, but then maybe they'd have gotten better results, less troubles and slightly less egg on their faces!
hehe, I just enjoy starting the hacker/cracker debate. Seems that since this is for a good cause it should be called hacking. If I broke in and did a rm -rf / that would be cracking. If I broke in, got r00t and told the guy how that would be hacking.
Well, let this be a lesson to all of you folks jumping blindly on to the Red Hat IPO Bandwagon that Linux is not (yet anyways) an enterprise solution. Hopefully some of this money they raised can go towards further development to finally rid all of these documented bugs.
Get out a can of Raid, Linus, because you've got a lot of bug smashing in your next kernel to do before this OS is ready for the challenge.
Watch out, Red Hat + 5 years = M$
Keep Open Source uncorrupted, and uncorporate!
The Lizard King
I say give the machine to Omar Shenker. He's the only person who managed to get the web site changed.
They had to upgrade the machine they were using. They started out with a P2-350MHz machine and 128MB of ram. They've now posted their config, which is a P3-500MHz and 256MB of ram. sounds like bills' bug bit himself. Upgrade to upgrade.
I once did a fork bomb that was a shell script that called itself twice on a friends box. Either it crashed, or it was slowed down so much that its state was indistinguishable from a hardlock. The owner of the box had to hard reboot it, couldnt log in from anywhere. I guess this sort of fork bomb would essentially be a memory gobbling fork bomb like someone else described since each execution of the script uses 300k (at least on my alpha unix box that I'm sitting at) or so for bash.
windoZzzz... did not even stay up.
Microsoft implicitly acknowledged the contest when they posted their Admin password after LinuxPPC posted their root password.
Umm, whoever said Linux couldn't handle it didn't read the article! The machine was doing fine, but their ISP so NO MORE!
Next time read more carefully.
Yeah, you sure would be da bomb if you "got r00t" since he published the root password. Try just getting onto the box.
Not to mention this cult of personality that everyone here seems to have built up around Linus Torvalds. To read the posts, you'd think "Linus" (what, everyone's on a first-name basis with somebody they've never met?) is every /.er's best friend, favorite uncle, and the Messiah to boot.
"Don't touch the bunny!"
Anyone noticed that he telnetted into the box to do the update? Did anyone snag the password?? Its not entirely surprising that people are trying to grab upstream boxes ..
-avi
So what's with www.windows2000test.com? I haven't been able to get there for a week. Did they give up? I live just north of Seattle so I know it isn't the weather this time....
---
Put Hemos through English 101!
"An armed society is a polite society" -- Robert Heinlein
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
Jesus, a sane and reasonable poster on slashdot, one who is not on the "NT Sucks because it's Microsoft" bandwagon. What is this place coming to? Next thing you know the "NT was mentioned in magazine X" sort of articles atart appearing :)
The poster is right, get a clue people. MS hires many of the best programmers acs computer scientists out there. The bugs in their code are more due to insane shipping date then the developers' incompetence.
If you mean; "Window is the best thing to toss an MS Windows machine out of" then I'm with you... if however you mean "MS Windows is the best thing ever", then maybe you should be tossed out a window. .sig begins: Beware TPB
Hardly. According to the win2k status page "10:00am - Installed an update to the TCP stack which ran through private testing last night. Updates to TCP make it more efficient in processing the volume of SYN packets received by the server. CPU load is now fairly steady at 35%. Kernel memory use is steady. Number of connections is running between 180-220. Incoming data stream is about 2100 pkts/sec. " So the W2K server is currently handling 5 times the load that the LPPC server died under.
Linux handled it just fine. It only went down once. It looks like the big reason for ending the contest is that people were trying to hack into other machines nearby. (Probably trying to install a sniffer, or something) Read before you post.
Wrong, zealot. According to the win2k status page "10:00am - Installed an update to the TCP stack which ran through private testing last night. Updates to TCP make it more efficient in processing the volume of SYN packets received by the server. CPU load is now fairly steady at 35%. Kernel memory use is steady. Number of connections is running between 180-220. Incoming data stream is about 2100 pkts/sec. " So the W2K server is currently handling 5 times the load that the LPPC server died under.
The DoS attacks appear to be continuing. Microsoft has posted things our their status page indicating that, but they are working on the IP stack to have it handle the attacks better. The reason MS put up the server was to give it some rigorous testing to help improve it. I don't know why people gripe about Microsoft so much because from my use at work their products are improving at a quite rapid pace. I'm not familiar with the defaults on LinuxPPC in terms of security. Most Linux distributions I have used(Slackware, RedHat) have not been very good security wise.
What exactly did they expect to happen? I mean, they did offer an open challenge to crack their machine, didn't they? Anybody who has a clue would naturally expect to see people attempting to crack other machines on the same network in the hope of finding user accounts that would work on the LinuxPPC box. Seems obvious to me anyway. So how could they possibly complain with a straight face about getting too many crack attempts?
Instead of while(1) fork(); try while(1) malloc(1); /*c*/ or while(1) new char; //c++ Either one has the same effect -- the system crashes.
hehehe...nice one dude.
Perhaps that's the Micro$oft security strategy - if you can't connect to the box you can't crack it - you can't get more secure than that!
;)
Admit it. LinuxPPC was just being st00pid.
Of all the /.ers on here, is there anyone with enough resources to take over the responsibility of hosting this contest. We can't let MS appear to win just because they can afford the bandwidth. What about happyhacker.org?? Will they host it?
personaly, I'd take Linux over Win 2k - but OpenBSD is more secure then both. (faster ta boot). Still, Linux is still quite nice (I'd use BSD Unix as a server, but Linux as a workstation O.S.) and highly configurable.
So you're saying Omar just performed a "Kevin Mitnick" style 'human engineering' feat. Sounds typical for the hacker set.
Hey, if it crashes the system... Honor? When trashing Microsoft?
PPC was up during a period when Win went down several times. The stats are about equal.
PPC comment for 8/5
18:58 CST: Averaging 437.46 packets per second(tcpdump)
Windows:
Perfmon info from 8/5/99 4:00pm
Datagrams Received/sec Avg: 326
Fragments Received/secAvg: 104
Total Fragment Reassembly Errors1574000 in the last 3 hours
Connections/sec Avg: 100
% Processor Time Avg: 20
Memory use steady at about 113264K
"And don't you recon that the hordes of MS defenders on this planet might have felt some motivation to crack crack, if only to prove to the world that NT doesn't really stink as bad as its odor would lead one to believe? "
No "NT defender" has the same motivation as many of the cult-memberish Linux community. Trying to pretend so is ridiculous. I defend NT, but only against complete FUD that is so rampant in the Linux advocacy camp ("Any fact, even made up, is good by us!"). I hardly care about a Linux test box though.
Right on. A thoughtful, reasonable and informational post. Thanks guy/gal whoever you are.
;-)
It's good to see there are still people who have their wits at the same time they have something worth saying. I'd almost begun to think they were mutually exclusive.
cheers,
-matt
> No "NT defender" has the same motivation as many of the cult-memberish Linux community. Trying to pretend so is ridiculous.
You need to get on over to comp.os.linux.advocacy and count the full-time (and I do mean full time) NT advocates that have set up camp for trolling and laying turf. You might learn that NT, like Linux, Amiga, OS/2, and the Mac, has extremists among its "defenders".
Trying to pretend otherwise is ridiculous.
ps -- Didja hear today's news that a Micorsoft employee got caught red-handed in a bit of anti-AOL astroturfing? I reckon not, or you wouldn't be saying that no NT advocates have "cult-memberish" motivations.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
On MVS (dont ask) when resources are being crunched, it goes into slowdown mode. As for paging, one has different heaps, with different protection keys. Thereagain, it cheats by having inbuilt hardware protection/features. Plus they have boxes faster than anyone else. Result. Perfection. Maybe IBM is readying a new contest?
I'd hate to kill my uptime... Your local Electric Utility would hate that too. Keep loggin' those hours. Best if you not do anything risky on the machine. In fact, put up a second machine you never do anything at all on, just to log hours of uptime. Uptime stats are what count. You should see the babes flock when I mention mine at the local bar.
I was surprised to see that crack.linuxppc had crashed and even more so by the claims in this thread that Linux was vulnerable to death by malloc. So I whipped up a quick "while(1) malloc(1024)" and was flabberghasted to see the machine more or less hangup for a while. Then the init process seg-faulted as did some other stuff like cron leaving behind a bunch of zombies. The kernel itself survived and response returned but with no init left it was essentially rendered useless for login. This is on SuSe 6.1 intel(2.2.7). I'm totally disillusioned that it's that easy to take out a linux box!
you know in some kind of ironic way this troll is half-right...
-- your knees hurt, don't they?
After the first day or so (once everyone started finding out about the box), the Win2K status page reported frequently receiving over 6000 frames/sec (> 7000 datagrams/sec). The highest packets/sec that I see reported on the LinuxPPC status page is about 556. I'm not sure what number you're referring to on the Win2K status logs.
Seeing as the LinuxPPC group dropped out of the competition, blaming it on attacks upon other computers, while we haven't seen any such whines from the Win2K group (as if the Win2K box attackers haven't been trying the same tricks), I'm not at all convinced that the LinuxPPC box could've stood up to the attacks that the Win2K box has received. Did any but the most wacked-out zealots really believe that people would go after the Linux box the hardest?
For the Linux zealots: I hope every name that you were prepared to call the Win2K team had they dropped out, will now be applied to the LinuxPPC team. Quitters, babies, whatever. C'mmmmon, don't tell me you wouldn't have. Just look at all the yahoos who just about wet their pants just because someone toyed with the JavaScript in their Win2K guestbook posts.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
On the other hand, the Windows 2000 box might have crashed after receiving 200+ packets/second, and never had a chance to go up to 417 packets/second.
Wish we could know exactly what's happening, but MS is trying to spin this, not really gain anything from it.
Probably for the Mindcruft benchmarks. Stability wasn't an issue then.
Ooops.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
For Redhat linux (5 and above?) It's set down too 256.
Use ulimit in /etc/profile and limit each user to a sane number of processes. I set mine to 128. Ran a forkbomb, and the box slowed down quite a bit (processor spiked...hehe) but I was able to kill off the offender and things came back down to normal.
malign.com and dotslash.org are freaking me out. Neither are owned by Rob. The owner of malign.com also owns a porn site. This is weird.
I mean, Since the machine is offline because it crashes half the time, it cannot be accessed globally, therefore higher security.
Instead of "Security through obscurity", it's "Security through instability"?
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
just /.ed. Ever since that bit about the Kansas board of education (broke Hellmouth's record!) it's been slow, but not down. I can't guaruntee that it was up yesterday (the 11th) but it was up whenever I tried this morning (the 12th). It was r*e*a*l*l*y slow, but still up. The Kansas story went up at ~7pm the 11th, so that seems to be a good explination.
This is what I got from the status page the last time I checked.
Perfmon info from 8/6/99 12:50pm
Datagrams Received/sec Avg: 4518
Fragments Received/sec Avg: 70
Total Fragment Reassembly Errors 456642 since 9:20am
Connections Avg: 618
Total GET requests 145,000+ since 9:20am
% Processor Time Avg: 30-47
One attack succeeded in hanging the box, but the guru's were off a linux world.
and then the ISP turned on the firewall.
i am on the same isp as crack.linuxppc.org and i was getting nailed with all kinds of stupid attacks. they must have scanned the entire execpc class b subnet. I had tons of telnet requests into my server and someone successfuly crashed my win 98 machine (yea i know its sucks) many many times (DoS attacks and nukes).
There will always be problems, of course. But what they are fixing happen to be what Linux has been known to be good at. First speed with the benchmarking fiasco. And now security. Linux has to be a big threat in their eyes. I wonder what they are going to come up with next?
I don't think Linux is going to become more than a cheap viable alternative as a servor OS for some time. I am looking forward to what I like to call "wave 2" when Linux or another free and open OS takes not the servor, but the desktop.
Mark my words.
--
no kidding.. god i was getting all kinds of attacks and crap. My connection was slowing down and i usually go pretty fast here. execpc should have the bandwidth to keep something like this up and running. im kind of dissappointed after seeing that they were being almost demanded to stop by execpc.
On the other hand, this could be because enthusiasm about DoSing it seems to have decreased. Now hopefully it will stay up long enough for intelligent attacks to have a chance.
I might have to change my opinion about the whole thing. It might actually have been a not-so-bad thing for MS to put this server up. If they can use this to find better ways to code NT and to choose some defaults that keep the system more stable, more power to them.
One of the big deals about the LinuxPPC system was that it was really secure by default. I think MS is trying to get Win2k more secure on initial install (to get any kind of security out of NT4, you have to change a bunch of config settings) - at least that was one of their selling points for Win2k. As far as that goes, this is probably the best thing they could have done. I'm sure Win2k won't be as stable as Linux, but this is a good step in the right direction.
Then again, it would be nice to be able to like the company that you are making rich. I know that I really have a lot of problems with Microsoft as a company. But I do want their products to improve, since I'll have to live and work with them, like them or not.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
>>Ooooh! What a great idea! A PowerPC version on an Intel box. Hmmmmm....
Right after that I'm going to run out and try to install W2K on an iMac. =D
AFAIK, the latter's supposed to be already possible, given that w2k is released, and you're running Virtual PC... So you might be able to do the latter first.
I wouldn't go so far as to say that running out of ram is not a problem. I think that there is something that most people are missing in this whole thing.
Computers, by their nature, are unstable. There are just to many variables involved to have a computer with no problems. So I am not surprised when computers crash and stuff. That's just something that has to be dealt with. The solution is to reduce the crashes to a minimum.
You can't say, well, neether OS is any good because they both crashed. You have to look at the overall status of how the OS works. LinuxPPC went about a whole week before crashing. W2K went for how many hours? If I am going to set up a web server I will not look at them both and say, "Well, they both crashed, I guess I'll not use either." Instead I'll be using the one that has the most uptime. That's what counts. It not as important as how many times it crashes, but how long it's up. And that's why I advocate Linux, even when it crashes occasionally.
-BrentI wouldn't go so far as to say that running out of ram is not a problem with Linux. I think that there is something that most people are missing in this whole thing.
Computers, by their nature, are unstable. There are just to many variables involved to have a computer with no problems. So I am not surprised when computers crash and stuff. That's just something that has to be dealt with. The solution is to reduce the crashes to a minimum.
You can't say, well, neether OS is any good because they both crashed. You have to look at the overall status of how the OS works. LinuxPPC went about a whole week before crashing. W2K went for how many hours? If I am going to set up a web server I will not look at them both and say, "Well, they both crashed, I guess I'll not use either." Instead I'll be using the one that has the most uptime. That's what counts. It not as important as how many times it crashes, but how long it's up. And that's why I advocate Linux, even when it crashes occasionally.
-Brent>If you put LinuxPPC on a P2 450 though...
Ooooh! What a great idea! A PowerPC version on an Intel box. Hmmmmm....
Right after that I'm going to run out and try to install W2K on an iMac. =D
Posted by Synsthe:
*sigh* Silly troll.
Linux couldn't handle it? It had nothing to do with Linux. Their bandwidth was dead. The linux box crashed a whole once due to not being allocated proper memory for such a task.
Meanwhile windows2000test.com has been down as much as linuxppc up, and up as much as linuxppc was down.
So I think if you believe this declares Windows the winner, that you need to get your eyes checked. Either that, or it means the frontal lobotomy was succesful.
Neither won. It wasn't a contest to see which would last longest. It was a contest to see if you could crack into the box. Since windows has been down, nobody has been able to crack it. Since immature folks (yourself included?) couldn't handle the contest at linuxppc, it has been taken to a new playing ground.
--
Mark Waterous (mark@projectlinux.org)
The windows2000test.com server has become more stable over the last couple of days as they fix issues. I was able to reach it all last night as well as most of the day today. It seems to be down now, but at least they are posting status reports. slashdot.org which was down from yesterday early evening until about noon today, and is not responding well at this time. I see no status reports? And then crack.linuxppc.org completely throws in the towel after the machine starts getting hit hard enough to cause it to crash. I guess I think it's strange the reaction that you are having to this. It's pretty hypocritical. If anything Microsoft should be commended for continuing the challenge to improve their products. Anyway, tis funny watching the resonses here. I especially liked the one about the childish people attacking linuxppc, but then cheering on the people doing the same stupid thing to microsoft. heh
I wonder how many of those DoS packets were from GetAdmin et al... (a WinNT cracker, for those who don't know).
SOunded like the last time someone setup a "crack the Mac" contest - people used GetAdmin (!) on it.
Blah.. You set out to show that a default install of Linux PPC is secure.. considering the number of script kiddies you got throwing every useless thing at it, I'd say it is. Big deal, default installs have been externally "secure" for years. The most machines get broken into because they are incorrectly configured or they are access remotely with authorization passed in the clear. Sniffing is the way crackers get through external security and once inside is where the default install becomes an issue. When you propose a challenge like this you have to state that you are seeking a penetration test. You want the external security tested, not your access policies.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I'd hate to have an IP anywhere close to the Windows2000 crack(rock) site. In fact I'd hate to have anything within a class b range. God knows how many kiddies are doing batch port scans looking for god-knows-what. Seems like 'hacking' has changed its definition once again from systematically attacking a problem using logic to massivly attacking it with a sledgehammer.
BortBox
What would be better would be if Microsoft listened to the bug reports it got after it released it. Better yet would be to release source in the interests of security but that's never gunna happen. I feel justified in comparing a "come and crack us" security test against an operating system that we havn't even seen the asm code for, let alone the source code, to a "crack this encryption" snake oil scam. You prove little in either case.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I can't get to www.windows2000test.com to test this, but given the conversation on the group, the w2k box has a guestbook running that doesn't check for javascript. As the W2K test box doesn't have any remote admin stuff running (or so we're told), at some point, SOMEONE at the w2k test box will look at their guestbook whilst sitting at the console.
So, asking as a person who hates Javash^Hcript with a passion, how easy would it be to write a JScript that installs back orifice whenever the IP of the reader matches the IP of w2ktest.com? You can NOT look me in the face and tell me there's no IE bug that will let it remotely execute a BO2K installer....
-Lx?
I thought Linux was supposed to be invincible!
Here's hoping that the Linux zealots will finally get a clue and quit the constant FUD spewing.
I don't think that the slashdot community defends anything non-MS, far from it... I believe that /. tries to be objective.
ROTFLMAO! To read the average post from the "slashdot community", you'd think Linux was the cure to cancer! (Hint: it's just another Unix clone, and not even a very good one at that. Why it got popular while the superior BSD variants toiled in obscurity, I'll never understand.)
But to be perfectly fair, I think it's true that the slashdot community doesn't defend anything non-MS -- rather, the community defends Linux even when it doesn't deserve it and attacks MS regardless. It's like a sporting event where the Linux zealots are just blindly rooting for the home team. Objective? Not on your life.
It's people being jackasses and ping flooding, smurfing, etc.. the box itself and others on the network.
A little clue here: You can't break into the box with ping -f, people.
Yet Another Example of how stupidity, immaturity and a lack of respect ruins a good thing (tm).
Its ironic that anyone who contributed to the problems outline on crack.linuxppc.org contributed nothing at all. And probably never does.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Get real. The Linux machine crashes once over the course of like six days, as compared to a windows machine that's been down so many times that I only managed to get onto it for the first time about to hours ago. So windows, with all it's stability problems, suddenly 'wins' because Linux isn't perfect? What kind of logic is that? It's questionable as to whether the one crash Linux did experience is the fault of the OS, or the operator who thought that less than 2x RAM as swap would be enough. They only discontinued the contest because they were tired of the idiots who thought that DoS attacks would somehow allow them to crack the server.
I thought people specialized in this sort of thing, cracking and all that. Guess that stuff only happens in 'Hacker Crackdown' books. One could of course assume such a "high profile" target would shunned by the highly skilled, anonimity-craving Cracker Elite, but I'd be tempted to say 6u115h1t on that!
**>>BELCH
too many stupid people in the world,
/. follows a link. What happens if .01% of /. decides to packet flood, DNS spoof and otherwise attack whole segments of the net?
so little napalm.
Both challenges were pretty stupid attention getting stunts. We know web servers crash when everyone on
Bad metaphor:
They tried to invite the world to come party in a one horse salon at the end of a dirt road.
As linuxppc says on their sight legitimate hack attempts were not possible due to the large packet loss caused by the high traffic.
It stayed up under large traffic, that was good.
Maybe Microsoft can afford the support to keep their network running. Hopefully the whole thing will quietly go away. It was a good load test for both systems. Not a good security test.
Yeah, out of ram is not the machine. How come you defend anything non-MS, but if MS has the exact same thing it's bad. Selective hatred huh?
I mean, Since the machine is offline because it crashes half the time, it cannot be accessed globally, therefore higher security. Something MS should consider in their promotion Documation. Higher Security: Windows 2000 has much higher security than previous versions. When Windows 2000 detects a Security attack in progress, It produces a Blue Screen Stop Error, Effectively halting the Hacker and protecting your vital files from harm.
all the pings were probably coming from annoyed microsoft employees and supporters who figured just crashing the box would be good enough.
Aside from the issues of showing up on every single security detection tool, I don't see much of a problem. CPU time is cheap and human time expensive. Let the computer do more of the work scanning. If it gets lucky, you have to put out a lot less effort.
What do you define as "real" hacking and not script-kiddying? I mean, a) you find a hole and write an exploit, or someone else does -- either way in a common piece of software like Apache or something, or b) you find a hole in the target's propriatory software (like a CGI problem or something), and exploit that. B) seems to be commonly considered a "script kiddie" exploit these days. Using someone else's exploits/discovered holes is "script kiddieing". What's left? Are you required to sit down and find your own overflow or whatever in IIS or whatever and write your own exploit to be considered "good"? (Disclaimer: I've never written more than 6 or so lines of assembly in a single clump...)
What, "real" hackers don't use scripts? So do these elite skillmongers type out commands 200 times, or do they just ignore holes that could easily be found with a script because it's "beneath them"?
Get freaking real. Everyone bashes the elusive "script kiddies"...is anyone here ready to say that they are a "real" hacker, and what makes them so? All the attacks that ever seem to make the news seem to be slammed as "script kiddie attacks". (Okay, yeah, it's probably the good ones that don't get noticed. But then what the heck are they?)
Is packet sniffing elite? Ummm....don't think so.
How about using a rootkit? Errr...don't think so again.
I'll agree flat out that smurfing and friends for the sole purpose of aggravating the target is pretty lame, but what *isn't*?
What the *heck* is left?
You understand how TCP works, right? Just because you can't get on doesn't mean the machine is down. More likely it's just getting flooded so heavily that real connection attempts can't get through. The stats show that the Linux box wasn't getting anywhere's near the packet rate that the Win 2K box has been getting, so it should have had an easy time of it. Instead it crashed. I'm not impressed.
Perfmon info from 8/6/99 12:50pm
Datagrams Received/sec Avg: 4518
% Processor Time Avg: 30-47
8/11/99 Events
21:30 - There is so much traffic to the site that it is going to be difficult to get connections.
Frames/sec 6,000
Bytes/sec 400,000
Datagrams Received/sec 2312
Datagrams Sent/sec 3146
% Processor Time 99
I have a clear picture of where the linuxppc folks were coming from when dealing with the bandwidth usage. I access the internet through execpc, their service provider, and was forced to use another service temporarily as establishing connections grew impossible. tcpdump was also picking up more than it's fair share of really odd packets as well. I never thought a mere modem user could feel the heat of traffic upstream, but it was certainly felt. If Microsoft were really sure of their product, they would offer to host the linuxppc machine at this point.
I find it interesting that the DNS servers listed as authoritative for the windows2000test.com domain (man whois(1)) don't seem to respond anymore. Perhaps MS has also decided to back out, sneaking away like a misbehaved child who's been caught?
If like most of us you have a machine with finite resources (memory, swap space, kernel PID's, whatever) then it is possible to come up with a situation where you run out of them. Handling all possible situations of this kind is not a core responsibility of the kernel, working well in more common situations is.
It is impossible to guarantee to defend against all possible DoS attacks while maintaining service to legitimate users (for the CS grads - Decidability, Halting Problem)
In a real situation, web servers sit behind firewalls.
Dave
MIMEType: application/x-totally-insecure
Action: Run immediately
Regardless, I think they now filter all html tags out (and by "now" I mean "those brief intevals when the box is actually up")
----------------------
"This moon-cheese will make me very rich! Very rich indeed!
There is no K5 cabal.
I am not the real rusty.
--
8/12/99 Events
12:00 We are still trying to find the right configuration to handle the combination of legitimate connection requests and the flood of attack packets. The new TCPIP stack has a couple of different configuration values that affect how it responds. Yes, we will be publishing exactly how this server is configured.
8:00 The server crashed again this morning. In the same part of the TCPIP stack as before. The TCPIP stack is still having difficulty with a prolonged attack. We are going to try some different configurations and see if we can bump up the connection rate.
Configuration
500MHz Pentium III with 256mb of RAM.
Geeky modern art T-shirts
mm.. spelling on the site might have been improved.... just a thought
...sie sind nicht grün
Won't stop hacking it though.
Yeah, out of ram is not the machine. How come you defend anything non-MS, but if MS has the exact same thing it's bad. Selective hatred huh?
/. tries to be objective. The fact of the matter is, if both machines were side-by-side with identical hardware and usage, the W2K box would fail way before the LinuxPPC box did. If you don't believe this, I suggest you try it.
I don't think that the slashdot community defends anything non-MS, far from it... I believe that
Beware TPB
Dude, you got First Post!
and what exactly was this that Omar Shenker accomplished?
thanks
Actually, it depends...
If the box was a PPC box, yeah Windows would fail first.
If you put LinuxPPC on a P2 450 though...
That's not a reasonable analogy, b/c the cause of the hang is a configuration issue, not a bug. You could argue that they should of expected the extreme loads they got, but in their defense you would think that people would have known better than to try a ping flood as an "exploit". Even folks who've never cracked anything more than a can of beer (like me =) ) ought to know better than that...
...disciplining the ronkeys since 3/2000...
17:45 CST: Ok I got stuck on the phone all day, "and being the only one still here, came in today discovered crack had run out a RAM around 3 am. I could still switch consoles, and last snapshot of stats shows 3 MB of RAM and 4 MB of swap left free, so it was hung. I may have won a long standing arguement with this, "always have at least 2x RAM as swap." Oh well, it would have been up sooner if someone had been around to see it hung. -Brian(Not on the phone anymore). " My experience has been that LinuxPPC does NOT handle running out of RAM/Swap at *all*, as opposed to Intel Linux which kills random processes. Intel Linux at least has a chance. I've never seen (recent) PPC kernels survive running out of memory. I suspect a kernel bug.
It is only RFC-1122 compliant. TCP/IP a very much changed since. If they don't implement congestion avoidance, they using this stack on Windows machines, will result in an instant congestion collapse of all or parts of the Internet. Congestion avoidance was specifically implemented in response to such collapses in the 80ies, where the bandwidth on some backbones went down to several bit/seconds.
A direct translation of the note someone at microsoft managed to get published in Swedish newspaper (www.dn.se), if this is not a blatant lie I'd be very suprised. The notice though is very real:
Blizzard crashed Microsofts test Higher powers interfered when betatesters was about to attack one of Microsofts sites to look for security holes in the new Windows 2000. The system is supposed to be the most stable so far, according to the company. But Mother Nature struck with electrical storms in Redmond, Washington and brought down the server before anyone had a chance to start hacking
I am amazed that they tried to get away with something like this, with the publicity around www.windows2000test.com there is no confusion about that it would be the test referred to. I wouldn't have minded if I read it in flashback, but when my daily newspaper prints stuff like this I get really mad. Patrik
all I can say is, thanx for the ride. ;) too bad about the :P
it was fun, and many of us could still
use the machine
memory thing, big nod on the swap space
situation. It can be the difference
between breaking early, (as it were)
and grinding on through the insanity.
maybe y2k just needed more ram all this time
just wanted to point out that as the y2k is beta,
Linux is under constant revision,
not a flaw, but an advantage, me thinks.
Peace
Dolio
you mean the former?
He's gone the closest (pretty darn close - for my money) to date.
Since they have effectively pulled the plug on the experiment prematurely for reasons they really should have anticipated from the outset they should now cough up the goods!!!
I'm curious as to whether www.windows2000test.com and crack.linuxppc.org were under similar loads.
If the W2K box was getting 500 times the amount of traffic or something, it stands to reason that it would go down more often, quite aside from the relative stability of W2K vs. LinuxPPC; on the other hand, if the loads were similar, then this is a slam-dunk result in favor of Linux with regard to stability.
Either way, of course, it doesn't prove anything about the relative security of the OSes.
--
Do I look like I speak for my employer?