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Re: Can A Web Site Be Reliably Defended Against DoS Attacks?

• To: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...>
• Subject: Re: Can A Web Site Be Reliably Defended Against DoS Attacks?
• From: Rich Salz <rsalz@d...>
• Date: Wed, 04 Feb 2004 16:01:38 -0500
• Cc: "'jcowan@r...'" <jcowan@r...>, xml-dev@l...
• In-reply-to: <15725CF6AFE2F34DB8A5B4770B7334EE03F9F291@h...>
• References: <15725CF6AFE2F34DB8A5B4770B7334EE03F9F291@h...>
• User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030507

> That seems to say that in no case should one risk 
> any resource of critical value by putting it 
> on the web because eleven men so inclined can 
> always do it harm and this isn't a cost vs 
> benefit issue.

No, security is a risk-management issue.  If a dozen men can take me 
down for a day, and my daily revenue is $10/day, then it's not worth 
spending more than $10 to fix the problem.


> the overwhelming majority of defense in in the 
> social behavior of those outside one's own control, 
> that is, ensuring a system cannot be used to host 
> an attack.

Yup.  Unfortunately, the dominant desktop platform makes it very 
difficult to ensure this.  Esp when you consider how many VCR clocks 
still blink 12:00.  Consider it a case study as to why security and the 
Internet should not just be grafted on to an existing product that had 
no concept of "them," just "us."

> Is that really the case?  I read that Microsoft 
> was able to defend their servers this time 
> although SCO could not.

The virus was pointed at specific IP addresses (doing DNS lookups would 
have been too costly and obvious, I think).  Microsoft didn't defend, 
but they "ducked" by going to a new IP address.  SCO failed to defend 
themselves because they added a new name that pointed to the same IP 
address.  That was stupid and pointless.
	/r$

-- 
Rich Salz, Chief Security Architect
DataPower Technology                           http://www.datapower.com
XS40 XML Security Gateway   http://www.datapower.com/products/xs40.html
XML Security Overview  http://www.datapower.com/xmldev/xmlsecurity.html

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    • From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...>

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