Ascend Archive
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Re: (ASCEND) Feature Requests and Ascend?

On Fri, Oct 10, 1997 at 11:00:31AM -0600, Marc Slemko wrote:
> On Fri, 10 Oct 1997, Eric Wieling wrote:
> 
> > If someone wanted to "take down" UUNET's (or any other provider that
> > uses a lot of Ascend Max's) dial-up network, I wonder if it would
> > really be that easy.  Any one volunteering to try?  Those 3l33t d00ds
> > on IRC are sure to try eventually.
> 
> It would if they had immediate modem enabled.  I would bet that very few
> do.
> 
> The problem with this attack is that it is difficult to do without
> using a real IP address.  That makes it easy to trace. 

While it is true that it would be tough to spoof the source IP
address in this situation (unless the Max had poor sequence number
generation), throwaway dial-up accounts are cheap and easy to get. 

Also, since the Max doesn't (as far as I can tell) log ANY
information about people telnetting into the box, or about packets
that were blocked by filters, people may waste a lot of time trying to
figure out why their Max keeps on crashing and not think about
sniffing the traffic on their LAN to diagnose the problem.

Max's do seem to log Called ID information (well all of them except
mine - another gripe of mine) the only way to track down the person
that made the call would require involving the Feds and they are 1)
mostly clueless and 2) require some kind of large amount of money
lost because of the crime.

If someone wanted to find out if the Max's use weak seq number
generation methods and wrote up a paper on it, as well as the
Immediate Modem problem and released it to some technical news
company (like C|NET) I'd imagine that they could cause Ascend a fair
bit of bad press.  I have neither the time or the interest in doing
so, but someone might.  It really is better to fix these problems
than to ignore them and hope it will go away.

-- 
Eric Wieling (eric@ccti.net), Corporate Communications Technology
Sales: 504-585-7303 (sales@ccti.net), Support: 504-525-5449 (support@ccti.net)
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