DOS attacks

[zmatt]

My buddy has a server that he just setup. nothing special, its just a simple web server with ftp for a downloads section.


Anyways he is worried about Denial of Service attacks. I went on wikipedia and it seems most aren't a big deal anymore. But are there any DOS attacks that he should be worried about? And how can he guard against them?

 

[bla!!]

DOS attacks mostly target large-scale web servers. If your friend isn't doing anything that's in the corporate/business market, I wouldn't worry about them.

 

[murdocsvan]

well, thats not always the case. most of the time its kids and theyll target anything to find out if their new script works or just to show off. where i work, we sell KVM switches, which your probably havent heard of, and we've had some script kiddie trying a DOS onour webserver

we fixed it by installing software (i dont actually know the details) that only accepts one connection per IP, or i think the real techie here actually did some coding in unix because its a linux based server.

 

[zmatt]

well i know what kvm switches are. I help with the network at my school. But we havent had a DDOS in years. Last time they had one was abck when SYN Floods were effective.

As far as safeguards do you think that a decent firewall will do? I have him locked down against other threats (trojans, viri, etc etc) but DOS is a little different and he is paranoid about his server lol.

 

[murdocsvan]

just read my post properly, will ya? i said that to prevent a DOS attack on a server, you need a program that logs IP connections to the server, and then you just block the IP address from where a DOS attack is coming from or install software that does it automatically.

 

[zmatt]

well i did but it didn't help much. If I knew the program you spoke of that would be nice. And if I understand it correctly DOS attacks used spoofed IPs that are different in each packet. Is there some kind of app that can drop a reserved connection if an ACK is not received after a set period of time?

 

[chuzl]

Have you ever heard IDS(intrusion detection system)? Maybe you can have a tyr.
But you will spent some time to learn how to use it.