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Re: Attempt on smtpd / faking remote ip



Hi!

It looks like your friend is trying to inject pakets into your smtp with faked (spoofed) ips. In this particular case he sends as "localhost". I guess he does seqeunce-number guessing, so he assumes there is a running connection and if he hits the sequence, he may do nasty things with your postfix. Furthermore I guess it's not a spammer, this would be too inefficient. It's more likely that he tries to overflow postfix (unprobable) or procmail (suid root? postfix in chroot?) or your viruskiller or or or ..... Another possibility is that you have an http-server with a "formmail" in this boxen. Mail via this from come from localhost. It's an usual manner from spammers to exploit self-written mailforms by putting new header lines (To and CC) into to subject line of the form. (I had a case where they even put multipart-mime into the body ..woah..) You would see that in the http log (check!)

But in your case it really looks like someone trying to bind a shell via smtp and then connecting immediately to it. How can we be sure that the reporting "ssh" in your logfile is _your_ ssh and not a freshly bound?
(I don't know, anyone ideas?)

I don't want to spread fear, so
1.) Boot superrescue, knoppix or so
2.) Run chkrootkit (deb package is mostly a little old)
3.) If you run chkrotokit on Debian, chkrootkit reports one false positive! (AFAIR it was lkm rootkit, debian reports some ps processes to much, bug/incompatibility in ps command)

Rgds,
j.


--
Andreas John
net-lab GmbH
Luisenstrasse 30b
63067 Offenbach
Tel: +49 69 85700331

http://www.net-lab.net



Andreas Vent-Schmidt wrote:
Hi folks,

today I got some strange messages in the log files. It's a quite usual woody box (apache, some (about 15) POP accounts, no smtp relaying, no ftp accounts, nothing exciting) with postfix install from .deb-package.

###################### snip #####################
Apr 4 07:11:15 [myhostname] postfix/smtpd[11734]: lost connection after CONNECT from localhost[127.0.0.1] Apr 4 07:11:15 [myhostname] postfix/smtpd[11734]: lost connection after CONNECT from localhost[127.0.0.1] Apr 4 07:11:15 [myhostname] sshd[11733]: Did not receive identification string from 213.39.138.95 Apr 4 07:11:15 [myhostname] postfix/smtpd[11734]: lost connection after CONNECT from localhost[127.0.0.1] Apr 4 07:11:21 [myhostname] postfix/smtpd[11734]: lost connection after CONNECT from c138095.adsl.hansenet.de[213.39.138.95] Apr 4 07:11:21 [myhostname] postfix/smtpd[11734]: lost connection after CONNECT from c138095.adsl.hansenet.de[213.39.138.95] Apr 4 07:11:21 [myhostname] sshd[11735]: Did not receive identification string from 213.39.138.95 Apr 4 07:11:21 [myhostname] postfix/smtpd[11734]: lost connection after CONNECT from c138095.adsl.hansenet.de[213.39.138.95]
###################### snip #####################

(The "[myhostname]" entries are replacements made by me here for privacy reasons. There originally was the real hostname.)

Who the hell may connect from localhost and lose connection but a local user?
But, there is no (shouldn't be) any local user.

Is it possible to fake smtpd about the client's ip? I think, the guy from 213.39.138.95 is the same as the one in the first few lines, and he/she isn't real from localhost (I hope so), but fakes smtpd to think so. Am I right?

Or do I have to worry about some rootkit or anything similar?

Thanks in advance!

Andreas




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