Tag Archives: DoS

News from the Blog 2022-02-22

My Open Source projects

zpool watch

zpool watch is a small Python program for Linux workstations with graphical environment and ZFS, that checks every 30 seconds if your OpenZFS pools are Ok.

If a pool is not healthy, it displays a message in a window using tk inter.

Basically allows you to skip checking from the terminal zpool status continuously or to having to customize the ZED service to send an email and having to figure out how to it can spawn a window alert to the graphical system or what to do if the session has not been initiated.

carleslibs

Since last News from the Blog I’ve released carleslibs v.1.06, v.1.0.5 and v.1.0.4.

v.1.0.6 adds a new class OsUtils to deal with mostly-Linux Os tasks, like knowing the userid, the username, if it’s root, the distribution name and kernel version.

It also adds:

DatetimeUtils.sleep(i_seconds)

In v.1.0.5 I’ve included a new method for getting the Datetime in Unix Epoc format as Integer and increased Code Coverage to 95% for ScreenUtils class.

v. 1.0.4 contains a minor update, a method in StringUtils to escape html from a string.

It uses the library html (part of Python core) so it was small work to do for me to create this method, and the Unit Test for it, but I wanted to use carleslibs in more projects and adding it as core functionality, makes the code of these projects I’m working on, much more clear.

I’m working in the future v.1.0.7.

CTOP.py

I released the stable version 0.8.8 and tagged it.

Minor refactors and adding more Code Coverage (Unit Testing), and protection in the code for division per zero when seconds passed as int are 0. (this was not an actual error, but is worth protecting the code just in case for the future)

Working on branch 0.8.9.

Currently in Master there is a stable version of 0.8.9 mainly fixing https://gitlab.com/carles.mateo/ctop/-/issues/51 which was not detecting when CTOP was running inside a Docker Container (reporting Unable to decode DMI).

My Books

Docker Combat Guide

Added 20 new pages with some tricks, like clearing the logs (1.6GB in my workstation), using some cool tools, using bind mounts and using Docker in Windows from command line without activating Docker Desktop or WSL.

https://leanpub.com/docker-combat-guide/

BTW if you work with Windows and you cannot use Docker Desktop due to the new license, in this article I explain how to use docker stand alone in Windows, without using WSL.

ZFS on Ubuntu

One of my SATA 2TB 2.5″ 5,400 rpm drive got damaged and so was generating errors, so that was a fantastic opportunity to show how to detect and deal with the situation to replace it with a new SATA 2TB 3.5″ 7,200 rpm and fix the pool.

So I updated my ZFS on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS book.

Python 3

I’ve updated Python 3 Exercises for Beginners and added a new example of how to parse the <title> tag from an HTML page, using Beautifulsoup package, to the repository of Python 3 Combat Guide book.

A simple example to grab the title of a page using Python and beautifulsoup4

I also added three new exercises, and solved them.

My friend Michela is translating the book to Italian. Thanks! :)

If you already purchased any of my books, you can download the updates of them when I upload them to LeanPub.

Free courses

Code Challenges

One of my students sent me this platform, which is kinda hackerrank, but oriented to video games. To solve code challenges by programming video games.

He is having plenty of fun:

https://www.codingame.com/start

More Symfony, APIs

If you enjoyed the Free Videos about Symfony, there is more.

https://symfonycast.com/screencast/api-platform

It talks about a bundle for building APIs.

And this tutorial explains in detail how to work with Webpack Encore:

https://symfonycasts.com/screencast/webpack-encore

Paid courses

100 Days of Code: Python Bootcamp

A friend of mine, and colleague, Michela, is following this bootcamp and recommends it for people learning from ground 0.

https://udemy.com/course/100-days-of-code/

My work at Blizzard

The company sent me the Stein, which is sent to the employees that serve for two years, with a recognition and a celebration called “The Circle of Honor”.

Books purchased

I bought this book as often I discover new ways, better, to explain the things to my students.

Sometimes I buy books for beginners, as I can get explained what I want to do super fast and some times they teach nice tricks that I didn’t know. I have huge Django books, and it took a lot to finish them.

A simpler book may only talk about how to install and work with it under a platform (Windows or Mac, as instance) but it is all that I require as the command to create projects are the same cross platform.

For example, you can get to install and to create a simple project with ORM, connected to the database, very quickly.

Software

So I just discovered that Zoom has an option to draw in the shared screen, like Slack has. It is called Annotate. It is super useful for my classes. :)

Also discovered the icons in the Chat. It seems that not all the video calls accept it.

Hardware

As Working From Home I needed an scanner, I looked in Amazon and all of them were costing more than €200.

I changed my strategy and I bought a All-In-One from HP, which costed me €68.

So I’ll have a scanner and a backup printer, which always comes handy.

The nightmare started after I tried to connect it with Ubuntu.

Ubuntu was not recognizing it. Checking the manuals they force to configure the printer from an Android/iPhone app or from their web page, my understanding is for windows only. In any case I would not install the proprietary drivers in my Linux system.

Annoyed, I installed the Android application, and it was requesting to get Location permissions to configure it. No way. There was not possible to configure the printer without giving GPS/Location permissions to the app, so I cancelled the process.

I grabbed a Windows 10 laptop and plugged the All-in-one through the USB. I ran the wizard to search for Scanners and Printers and was not unable to use my scanner, only to configure as a printer, so I was forced to install HP drivers.

Irritated I did, and they were suggesting to configure the printer so I can print from Internet or from the phone. Thanks HP, you’ll be the next SolarWinds big-security-hole. I said no way, and in order to use the Wifi I have to agree to open that security door which is that the printer would be connected to Internet permanently, sending and receiving information. I said no, I’ll use only via USB.

Even selecting that, in order to scan, the Software forces me to create an account.

Disappointing. HP is doing very big stupid mistakes. They used to be a good company.

Since they stopped doing the drivers in Barcelona years ago, their Software and solutions (not the hardware) went to hell.

I checked the reviews in the App Store and so many people gave them 1 star and have problems… what a shame the way they created this solution.

Donations

I made a donation to OpenShot Video Editor.

This is a great Open Source, multi-platform editor, so I wanted to support the creator.

Security

Attacks: looking for exploits

This is just a sample of a set of attacks to the blog in a 3 minutes interval.

Another one this morning:

Now all are blocked in the Firewall.

This is a non stop practice from spammers and pirates that has been going on for years.

It was almost three decades ago, when I was the Linux responsible of an ISP, and I was installing a brand new Linux system connected to a service called “infovia”, at the time when Internet was used with dial-up and modems, and in the interval of time of the installation, it got hacked. I had the Ethernet connected. So then already, this was happening.

The morning I was writing this, I blocked thousands of offending Ip Addresses.

Protection solutions

I recommend you to use CloudFlare, is a CDN/Cache/Accelerator with DoS protection and even in its Free version is really useful.

Fun/Games

So I come with a game kind of Quiz that you can play with your friends, family or work colleagues working from home (WFH).

The idea is that the master shares screen and sound in Zoom, and then the rest connect to jackbox.tv and enter the code displayed on the master’s screen on their own browser, and an interactive game is started.

It is recommended that the master has two monitors so they can also play.

The games are so fun as a phrase appearing and people having to complete with a lie. If your friends vote your phrase, believing is true, you get points. If you vote the true answer, you get points too.

Very funny and recommendable.

Stuff

<humor>Skynet sent another terminator to end me, but I terminated it. Its processor lays exhibited in my home now</humor>

I bought a laminator.

It has also a ruler and a trimmer to cut the paper.

It was only €39 and I’ve to say that I’m very happy with the results.

It takes around 5 minutes to be ready, it takes to get to the hot-enough temperature, and feeds the pages slowly, around 50 secs a DIN-A4, but the results are worth the time.

I’ve protected my medical receipts and other value documents and the work was perfect. No bubbles at all. No big deal if the plastic covers are introduced not 100% straight. Even if you pass again an already plasticized document, all is good.

Fun

Databases

One of my friends sent me this image.

It is old, but still it’s fun. So it assumes the cameras of the parking or speed cameras, will OCR the plate to build a query, and that the code is not well protected. So basically is exploiting a Sql Injection.

Anybody working on the systems side, and with databases, knows how annoying are those potential situations.

Python and coding

Migrating some Services from Amazon to Digital Ocean

Analyzing the needs

I start with a VM, to learn about the providers and the migration project as I go.

My VM has been running in Amazon AWS for years.

It has 3.5GB of RAM and 1 Core. However is uses only 580MB of RAM. I’m paying around $85/month for this with Amazon.

I need to migrate:

DNS Server
Email
Web
Database

For the DNS Server I don’t need it anymore, each Domain provider has included DNS Service for free, so I do not longer to have my two DNS.

For the email I find myself in the same scenario, most providers offer 3 email accounts for your domain, and some alias, for free.

I’ll start the Service as Docker in the new CSP, so I will make it work in my computer first, locally, and so I can move easily in the future.

Note: exporting big images is not the idea I have to make backups.

I locate a Digital Ocean droplet with 1GB of RAM and 1 core and SSD disks for $5, for $6 I can have a NVMe version. That I choose.

Disk Space for the Statics

The first thing I do is to analyze the disk space needs of the service.

In this old AWS CentOS based image I have:

[root@ip-10-xxx-yyy-zzz ec2-user]# df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/xvda1       79G   11G   69G  14% /
devtmpfs        1.8G   12K  1.8G   1% /dev
tmpfs           1.8G     0  1.8G   0% /dev/shm

Ok, so if I keep the same I have I need 11GB.

I have plenty of space on this server so I do a zip of all the contents of the blog:

cd /var/www/wordpress
zip -r /home/ec2-user/wp_sizeZ.zip wp_siteZ

Database dump

I need a dump of the databases I want to migrate.

I check what databases are in this Server.

mysql -u root -p

mysql> show databases;

I do a dump of the databases that I want:

sudo mysqldump --password='XXXXXXXX' --databases wp_mysiteZ > wp_mysiteZ.sql

I get an error, meaning MySQL needs repair:

mysqldump: Got error: 145: Table './wp_mysiteZ/wp_visitor_maps_wo' is marked as crashed and should be repaired when using LOCK TABLES

So I launch a repair:

sudo mysqlcheck --password='XXXXXXXX' --repair --all-databases

And after the dump works.

My dump takes 88MB, not much, but I compress it with gzip.

gzip wp_mysiteZ.sql

It takes only 15MB compressed.

Do not forget the parameter –databases even if only one database is exported, otherwise the CREATE DATABASE and USE `wp_mysiteZ`; will not be added to your dump.

I will need to take some data form the mysql database, referring to the user used for accessing the blog’s database.

I always keep the CREATE USER and the GRANT permissions, if you don’t check the wp-config.php file. Note that the SQL format to create users and grant permissions may be different from a SQL version to another.

I create a file named mysql.sql with this part and I compress with gzip.

Checking PHP version

php -v
PHP 7.3.23 (cli) (built: Oct 21 2020 20:24:49) ( NTS )
Copyright (c) 1997-2018 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v3.3.23, Copyright (c) 1998-2018 Zend Technologies

WordPress is updated, and PHP is not that old.

The new Ubuntu 20.04 LTS comes with PHP 7.4. It will work:

php -v
PHP 7.4.3 (cli) (built: Jul  5 2021 15:13:35) ( NTS )
Copyright (c) The PHP Group
Zend Engine v3.4.0, Copyright (c) Zend Technologies
    with Zend OPcache v7.4.3, Copyright (c), by Zend Technologies

The Dockerfile

FROM ubuntu:20.04

MAINTAINER Carles Mateo

ARG DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive

# RUN echo "nameserver 8.8.8.8" > /etc/resolv.conf

RUN echo "Europe/Ireland" | tee /etc/timezone

# Note: You should install everything in a single line concatenated with
#       && and finalizing with 
# apt autoremove && apt clean

#       In order to use the less space possible, as every command 
#       is a layer

RUN apt update && apt install -y apache2 ntpdate libapache2-mod-php7.4 mysql-server php7.4-mysql php-dev libmcrypt-dev php-pear git mysql-server less zip vim mc && apt autoremove && apt clean

RUN a2enmod rewrite

RUN mkdir -p /www

# If you want to activate Debug
# RUN sed -i "s/display_errors = Off/display_errors = On/" /etc/php/7.2/apache2/php.ini 
# RUN sed -i "s/error_reporting = E_ALL & ~E_DEPRECATED & ~E_STRICT/error_reporting = E_ALL/" /etc/php/7.2/apache2/php.ini 
# RUN sed -i "s/display_startup_errors = Off/display_startup_errors = On/" /etc/php/7.2/apache2/php.ini 
# To Debug remember to change:
# config/{production.php|preproduction.php|devel.php|docker.php} 
# in order to avoid Error Reporting being set to 0.

ENV PATH_WP_MYSITEZ /var/www/wordpress/wp_mysitez/
ENV PATH_WORDPRESS_SITES /var/www/wordpress/

ENV APACHE_RUN_USER  www-data
ENV APACHE_RUN_GROUP www-data
ENV APACHE_LOG_DIR   /var/log/apache2
ENV APACHE_PID_FILE  /var/run/apache2/apache2.pid
ENV APACHE_RUN_DIR   /var/run/apache2
ENV APACHE_LOCK_DIR  /var/lock/apache2
ENV APACHE_LOG_DIR   /var/log/apache2

RUN mkdir -p $APACHE_RUN_DIR
RUN mkdir -p $APACHE_LOCK_DIR
RUN mkdir -p $APACHE_LOG_DIR
RUN mkdir -p $PATH_WP_MYSITEZ

# Remove the default Server
RUN sed -i '/<Directory \/var\/www\/>/,/<\/Directory>/{/<\/Directory>/ s/.*/# var-www commented/; t; d}' /etc/apache2/apache2.conf 

RUN rm /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default.conf

COPY wp_mysitez.conf /etc/apache2/sites-available/

RUN chown --recursive $APACHE_RUN_USER.$APACHE_RUN_GROUP $PATH_WP_MYSITEZ

RUN ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/wp_mysitez.conf /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/

# Please note: It would be better to git clone from another location and
# gunzip and delete temporary files in the same line, 
# to save space in the layer.
COPY *.sql.gz /tmp/

RUN gunzip /tmp/*.sql.gz; echo "Starting MySQL"; service mysql start && mysql -u root < /tmp/wp_mysitez.sql && mysql -u root < /tmp/mysql.sql; rm -f /tmp/*.sql; rm -f /tmp/*.gz
# After this root will have password assigned

COPY *.zip /tmp/

COPY services_up.sh $PATH_WORDPRESS_SITES

RUN echo "Unzipping..."; cd /var/www/wordpress/; unzip /tmp/*.zip; rm /tmp/*.zip

RUN chown --recursive $APACHE_RUN_USER.$APACHE_RUN_GROUP $PATH_WP_MYSITEZ

EXPOSE 80

CMD ["/var/www/wordpress/services_up.sh"]

Services up

For starting MySQL and Apache I relay in services_up.sh script.

#!/bin/bash
echo "Starting MySql"
service mysql start

echo "Starting Apache"
service apache2 start
# /usr/sbin/apache2 -D FOREGROUND

while [ true ];
do
    ps ax | grep mysql | grep -v "grep "
    if [ $? -gt 0 ];
    then
        service mysql start
    fi
    sleep 10
done

You see that instead of launching apache2 as FOREGROUND, what keeps the loop, not exiting from my Container is a while [ true ]; that will keep looping and checking if MySQL is up, and restarting otherwise.

MySQL shutting down

Some of my sites receive DoS attacks. More than trying to shutdown my sites, are spammers trying to publish comment announcing fake glasses, or medicines for impotence, etc… also some try to hack into the Server to gain control of it with dictionary attacks or trying to explode vulnerabilities.

The downside of those attacks is that some times the Database is under pressure, and uses more and more memory until it crashes.

More memory alleviate the problem and buys time, but I decided not to invest more than $6 USD per month on this old site. I’m just keeping the contents alive and even this site still receives many visits. A restart of the MySQL if it dies is enough for me.

As you have seen in my Dockerfile I only have one Docker Container that runs both Apache and MySQL. One of the advantages of doing like that is that if MySQL dies, the container does not exit. However I could have had two containers with both scripts with the while [ true ];

When planning I decided to have just one single Container, all-in-one, as when I export the image for a Backup, I’ll be dealing only with a single image, not two.

Building and Running the Container

I created a Bash script named build_docker.sh that does the build for me, stopping and cleaning previous Containers:

#!/bin/bash

# Execute with sudo

s_DOCKER_IMAGE_NAME="wp_sitez"

printf "Stopping old image %s\n" "${s_DOCKER_IMAGE_NAME}"
sudo docker stop "${s_DOCKER_IMAGE_NAME}"

printf "Removing old image %s\n" "${s_DOCKER_IMAGE_NAME}"
sudo docker rm "${s_DOCKER_IMAGE_NAME}"

printf "Creating Docker Image %s\n" "${s_DOCKER_IMAGE_NAME}"
# sudo docker build -t ${s_DOCKER_IMAGE_NAME} . --no-cache
sudo docker build -t ${s_DOCKER_IMAGE_NAME} .

i_EXIT_CODE=$?
if [ $i_EXIT_CODE -ne 0 ]; then
    printf "Error. Exit code %s\n" ${i_EXIT_CODE}
    exit
fi

echo "Ready to run ${s_DOCKER_IMAGE_NAME} Docker Container"
echo "To run type: sudo docker run -d -p 80:80 --name ${s_DOCKER_IMAGE_NAME} ${s_DOCKER_IMAGE_NAME}"
echo "or just use run_in_docker.sh"
echo
echo "Debug running Docker:"
echo "docker exec -it ${s_DOCKER_IMAGE_NAME} /bin/bash"
echo

I assign to the image and the Running Container the same name.

Running in Production

Once it works in local, I set the Firewall rules and I deploy the Droplet (VM) with Digital Ocean, I upload the files via SFTP, and then I just run my script build_docker.sh

And assuming everything went well, I run it:

sudo docker run -d -p 80:80 --name wp_mysitez wp_mysitez

I check that the page works, and here we go.

Some improvements

This could also have been put in a private Git repository. You only have to care about not storing the passwords in it. (Like the MySQL grants)

It may be interesting for you to disable directory browsing.

The build from the Git repository can be validated with a Jenkins. Here you have an article about setup a Jenkins for yourself.

Stopping definitively the massive Distributed DoS attack

I explain some final information and tricks and definitive guidance so you can totally stop the DDoS attacks affecting so many sites.

After effectively mitigating the previous DDoS Torrent attack to a point that was no longer harmful, even with thousands of requests, I had another surprise.

It was the morning when I had a brutal increase of the attacks and a savage spike of traffic and requests of different nature, so in addition to the BitTorent attack that never stopped but was harmful. I was on route to the work when the alarms raised into my smartphone. I stopped in a gas station, and started to fix it from the car, in the parking area.

Service was irresponsible, so first thing I did was to close the Firewall (from the Cloud provider panel) to HTTP and HTTPS to the Front Web Servers.

Immediately after that I was able to log in via SSH to the Servers. I tried to open HTTPS for our customers and I was surprised that most of the traffic was going through HTTPS. So I closed both, I called the CEO of the company to give status, and added a rule to the Firewall so the staff on the company would be able to work against the Backoffice Servers and browse the web while I was fixing all the mess. I also instructed my crew and gave instructions to support team to help the business users and to deal with customers issues while I was stopping the attack.

I saw a lot of new attacks in the access logs.

For example, requests like coming from Android SDK. Weird.

I blocked those by modifying the index.php (code in the previous article)

// Patch urgency Carles to stop an attack based on Torrent and exploiting sdk's // http://blog.carlesmateo.com if (isset($_GET['info_hash']) || (isset($_GET['format']) && isset($_GET['sdk'])) || (isset($_GET['format']) && isset($_GET['id']))) {

(Note: If your setup allows it and the HOST requested is another (attacks to ip), you can just check requestes HOST and block what’s different, or if not also implement an Apache rule to divert all the traffic to that route (like /announce for Bittorrent attack) to another file.)

Then, with the cron blocking the ip addresses all improved.

Problem was that I was receiving thousands of requests per second, and so, adding those thousands of Ip’s to IPTABLES was not efficient, in fact was so slow, that the process was taking more than an hour. The server continued overwhelmed with thousands of new ip’s per second while it was able to manage to block few per second (and with a performance adding ip’s degraded since the ip number 5,000). It was not the right strategy to fight back this attack.

Some examples of weird traffic over the http logs:

119.63.196.31 - - [01/Feb/2015:06:54:12 +0100] "GET /video/iiiOqybRvsM/images/av
atar/0097.jpg HTTP/1.1" 404 499 "-" "Baiduspider-image+(+http://www.baidu.com/se
arch/spider.htm)\\nReferer: http://image.baidu.com/i?ct=503316480&z=0&tn=baiduim
agedetail"
119.63.196.126 - - [01/Feb/2015:07:15:48 +0100] "GET /video/Ig3ebdqswQI/images/avatar/0114.jpg HTTP/1.1" 404 499 "-" "Baiduspider-image+(+http://www.baidu.com/search/spider.htm)\\nReferer: http://image.baidu.com/i?ct=503316480&z=0&tn=baiduimagedetail"
180.153.206.20 - - [30/Jan/2015:06:34:34 +0100] "GET /contents/all/tokusyu/skin_detail.html HTTP/1.1" 404 492 "-" "Mozilla/4.0"
180.153.206.20 - - [30/Jan/2015:06:34:35 +0100] "GET /contents/gift/ban_gift/skin_gift.js HTTP/1.1" 404 490 "http://top.dhc.co.jp/contents/gift/ban_gift/skin_gift.js" "Mozilla/4.0"
180.153.206.20 - - [30/Jan/2015:06:34:36 +0100] "GET /contents/all/content/skin.js HTTP/1.1" 404 483 "http://top.dhc.co.jp/contents/all/content/skin.js" "Mozilla/4.0
220.181.108.105 - - [30/Jan/2015:06:35:22 +0100] "GET /image/DbLiteGraphic/201405/thumb_14773360.jpg?1414567871 HTTP/1.1" 404 505 "http://image.baidu.com/i?ct=503316480&z=0&tn=baiduimagedetail" "Baiduspider-image+(+http://www.baidu.com/search/spider.htm)"
118.249.207.5 - - [30/Jan/2015:06:39:26 +0100] "GET /widgets.js HTTP/1.1" 404 0 "http://www.javlibrary.com/cn/vl_star.php?&mode=&s=azgcg&page=2" "Mozilla/5.0 (MSIE 9.0; qdesk 2.4.1266.203; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0; QQBrowser/8.0.3197.400) like Gecko"
120.197.109.101 - - [30/Jan/2015:06:57:20 +0100] "GET /ads/2015/20minutes/publishing/stval/3001.html?pos=6 HTTP/1.1" 404 542 "-" "20minv3/6 CFNetwork/609.1.4 Darwin/13.0.0"
101.226.33.221 - - [30/Jan/2015:07:00:04 +0100] "GET /?LR_PUBLISHER_ID=29877&LR_SCHEMA=vast2-vpaid&LR_PARTNERS=758858&LR_CONTENT=1&LR_AUTOPLAY=1&LR_URL=http://play.retroogames.com/penguin-hockey-lite/?pc1oibq9f5&utm_source=4207933&entId=7a6c6f60cd27700031f2802842eb2457b46e15c0 HTTP/1.1" 200 11783 "http://play.retroogames.com/penguin-hockey-lite/?pc1oibq9f5&utm_source=4207933&entId=7a6c6f60cd27700031f2802842eb2457b46e15c0" "Mozilla/4.0"
180.153.206.20 - - [30/Jan/2015:07:03:10 +0100] "GET /?metric=csync&p=3030&s=6109924323866574861 HTTP/1.1" 200 11783 "http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XODYzNzA0NTk2.html" "Mozilla/4.0"
180.153.114.199 - - [30/Jan/2015:07:05:18 +0100] "GET /?LR_PUBLISHER_ID=78817&LR_SCHEMA=vast2-vpaid&LR_PARTNERS=763110&LR_CONTENT=1&LR_AUTOPLAY=1&LR_URL=http://www.dnd.com.pk/free-download-malala-malala-yousafzai HTTP/1.1" 200 11783 "http://www.dnd.com.pk/free-download-malala-malala-yousafzai" "Mozilla/4.0"
60.185.249.230 - - [30/Jan/2015:07:08:20 +0100] "GET /scrape.php?info_hash=8%e3Q%9a%9c%85%bc%e3%1d%14%213wNi3%28%e9%f0. HTTP/1.1" 404 459 "-" "Transmission/2.77"
180.153.236.129 - - [30/Jan/2015:07:11:10 +0100] "GET /c/lf-centennial-services-hong-kong-limited/hk041664/ HTTP/1.1" 404 545 "http://hk.kompass.com/c/lf-centennial-services-hong-kong-limited/hk041664/" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.1; Trident/5.0); 360Spider(compatible; HaosouSpider; http://www.haosou.com/help/help_3_2.html)"
36.106.38.13 - - [30/Jan/2015:07:18:28 +0100] "GET /op/icon?id=com.wsw.en.gm.ArrowDefense HTTP/1.1" 404 0 "-" "Apache-HttpClient/UNAVAILABLE (java 1.4)"
180.153.114.199 - - [30/Jan/2015:07:19:12 +0100] "GET /?metric=csync&p=3030&s=6109985239380459533 HTTP/1.1" 200 11783 "http://vox-static.liverail.com/swf/v4/admanager.swf" "Mozilla/4.0"
180.153.206.20 - - [30/Jan/2015:07:39:56 +0100] "GET /?metric=csync HTTP/1.1" 20
0 11783 "http://3294027.fls.doubleclick.net/activityi;src=3294027;type=krde;cat=
krde_060;ord=94170148950.07014?" "Mozilla/4.0"
220.181.108.139 - - [30/Jan/2015:07:47:08 +0100] "GET /asset/assetId/5994450/size/large/ts/1408882797/type/library/client/WD-KJLAK/5994450_large.jpg?token=4e703a62ec08791e2b91ec1731be0d13&category=pres&action=thumb HTTP/1.1" 404 550 "http://www.passion-nyc.com/" "Baiduspider-image+(+http://www.baidu.com/search/spider.htm)"

And over HTTPS:

120.197.26.43 - - [29/Jan/2015:00:04:25 +0100] "GET /c/5356/cc.js?ns=_cc5356 HTTP/1.1" 404 11676 "http://m.accuweather.com/zh/cn/guangzhou/102255/current-weather/102255?p=huawei2" "HUAWEI Y325-T00_TD/V1 Linux/3.4.5 Android/2.3.6 Release/03.26.2013 Browser/AppleWebKit533.1 Mobile Safari/533.1;"
120.197.26.43 - - [29/Jan/2015:00:05:32 +0100] "GET /c/5356/cc.js?ns=_cc5356 HTTP/1.1" 404 11674 "http://m.accuweather.com/zh/cn/guangzhou/102255/weather-forecast/102255" "HUAWEI Y325-T00_TD/V1 Linux/3.4.5 Android/2.3.6 Release/03.26.2013 Browser/AppleWebKit533.1 Mobile Safari/533.1;"
117.136.1.106 - - [29/Jan/2015:06:35:05 +0100] "GET /v2.2/237613769760602?format=json&sdk=android&fields=supports_attribution%2Csupports_implicit_sdk_logging%2Cgdpv4_nux_content%2Cgdpv4_nux_enabled%2Candroid_dialog_configs HTTP/1.1" 404 6304 "-" "FBAndroidSDK.3.20.0"
117.136.1.106 - - [29/Jan/2015:06:35:11 +0100] "GET /v2.2/237613769760602?format=json&sdk=android&fields=supports_attribution%2Csupports_implicit_sdk_logging%2Cgdpv4_nux_content%2Cgdpv4_nux_enabled%2Candroid_dialog_configs HTTP/1.1" 404 6308 "-" "FBAndroidSDK.3.20.0"
117.136.1.107 - - [29/Jan/2015:06:35:36 +0100] "GET /v2.2/1493038024241481?fields=name,supports_implicit_sdk_logging,gdpv4_nux_enabled,gdpv4_nux_content,ios_dialog_configs,app_events_feature_bitmask&format=json&sdk=ios HTTP/1.1" 404 6731 "-" "FBiOSSDK.3.22.0"
180.175.55.177 - public [29/Jan/2015:07:40:23 +0100] "GET /public/checksum?a=8&t=p&v=2.5.0&c=d62c8d04f74057d51872d5dc5cdab098 HTTP/1.0" 404 39668 "https://rc-regkeytool.appspot.com/public/checksum?a=8&t=p&v=2.5.0&c=d62c8d04f74057d51872d5dc5cdab098" "Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1C28 Safari/419.3"

So, I was seeing requests that typically do applications like Facebook, smartphones with Android going to google store, and a lot of other applications and sites traffics, that was going diverted to my Ip.

So I saw that this attack was an attack associated to the ip address. I could change the ip in an extreme case and gain some hours to react.

So if those requests were coming from legitimate applications I saw two possibilities:

1. A zombie network controlled by pirates through malware/virus, that changes the /etc/hosts so those devices go to my ip address. Unlikely scenario, as there was a lot of mobile traffic and is not the easiest target of those attacks

2. A Dns Spoofing attack targeting our ip’s

That is an attack that cheats to Dns servers to make them believe that a name resolves to a different ip. (that’s why ssl certificates are so important, and the warnings that the browser raises if the server doesn’t send the right certificate, it allows you to detect that you’re connecting to a fake/evil server and avoid logging etc… if you have been directed a bad ip by a dns poisoned)

I added some traces to get more information, basically I dump the $_SERVER to a file:

$s_server_dump = var_export($_SERVER, true);

file_put_contents($s_debug_log_file, $s_server_dump.”\n”, FILE_APPEND | LOCK_EX);

array (
  'REDIRECT_SCRIPT_URL' => '/announce',
  'REDIRECT_SCRIPT_URI' => 'http://jonnyfavorite3.appspot.com/announce',
  'REDIRECT_STATUS' => '200',
  'SCRIPT_URL' => '/announce',
  'SCRIPT_URI' => 'http://jonnyfavorite3.appspot.com/announce',
  'HTTP_HOST' => 'jonnyfavorite3.appspot.com',
  'HTTP_USER_AGENT' => 'Bittorrent',
  'HTTP_ACCEPT' => '*/*',
  'HTTP_CONNECTION' => 'closed',
  'PATH' => '/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin',
  'SERVER_SIGNATURE' => '<address>Apache/2.4.7 (Ubuntu) Server at jonnyfavorite3.appspot.com Port 80</address>',
  'SERVER_SOFTWARE' => 'Apache/2.4.7 (Ubuntu)',
  'SERVER_NAME' => 'jonnyfavorite3.appspot.com',
  'SERVER_ADDR' => 'deleted',
  'SERVER_PORT' => '80',
  'REMOTE_ADDR' => '60.219.115.77',
  'DOCUMENT_ROOT' => 'deleted',
  'REQUEST_SCHEME' => 'http',
  'CONTEXT_PREFIX' => '',
  'CONTEXT_DOCUMENT_ROOT' => 'deleted',
  'SERVER_ADMIN' => 'deleted',
  'SCRIPT_FILENAME' => 'deleted',
  'REMOTE_PORT' => '27361',
  'REDIRECT_QUERY_STRING' => 'info_hash=%26%27%0F%C2%EB%03J%E2%1F%B0%28%2B%29d%7C%8C%FE%C8l%E9&peer_id=%2DSD0100%2Dj%7E%C3%1C%14%FFsj%DA9%0B%27&ip=10.155.31.47&port=9978&uploaded=2244978664&downloaded=2244978664&left=2570039513&numwant=200&key=511&compact=1',
  'REDIRECT_URL' => '/announce',
  'GATEWAY_INTERFACE' => 'CGI/1.1',
  'SERVER_PROTOCOL' => 'HTTP/1.0',
  'REQUEST_METHOD' => 'GET',
  'QUERY_STRING' => 'info_hash=%26%27%0F%C2%EB%03J%E2%1F%B0%28%2B%29d%7C%8C%FE%C8l%E9&peer_id=%2DSD0100%2Dj%7E%C3%1C%14%FFsj%DA9%0B%27&ip=10.155.31.47&port=9978&uploaded=2244978664&downloaded=2244978664&left=2570039513&numwant=200&key=511&compact=1',
  'REQUEST_URI' => '/announce?info_hash=%26%27%0F%C2%EB%03J%E2%1F%B0%28%2B%29d%7C%8C%FE%C8l%E9&peer_id=%2DSD0100%2Dj%7E%C3%1C%14%FFsj%DA9%0B%27&ip=10.155.31.47&port=9978&uploaded=2244978664&downloaded=2244978664&left=2570039513&numwant=200&key=511&compact=1',
  'SCRIPT_NAME' => '/index.php',
  'PHP_SELF' => '/index.php',
  'REQUEST_TIME_FLOAT' => 1422528394.036,
  'REQUEST_TIME' => 1422528394,
)

Some fields were replaced with ‘deleted’ for security.

Ok, so the client was sending a HOST header

jonnyfavorite3.appspot.com

This address resolves as:

ping jonnyfavorite3.appspot.com
PING appspot.l.google.com (74.125.24.141) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from de-in-f141.1e100.net (74.125.24.141): icmp_seq=1 ttl=52 time=1.53 ms

So to google appspot.

Next one:

array (
  'REDIRECT_SCRIPT_URL' => '/v2.2/1493038024241481',
  'REDIRECT_SCRIPT_URI' => 'https://graph.facebook.com/v2.2/1493038024241481',
  'REDIRECT_HTTPS' => 'on',
  'REDIRECT_SSL_TLS_SNI' => 'graph.facebook.com',
  'REDIRECT_STATUS' => '200',
  'SCRIPT_URL' => '/v2.2/1493038024241481',
  'SCRIPT_URI' => 'https://graph.facebook.com/v2.2/1493038024241481',
  'HTTPS' => 'on',
  'SSL_TLS_SNI' => 'graph.facebook.com',
  'HTTP_HOST' => 'graph.facebook.com',
  'HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING' => 'gzip, deflate',
  'CONTENT_TYPE' => 'multipart/form-data; boundary=3i2ndDfv2rTHiSisAbouNdArYfORhtTPEefj3q2f',
  'HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE' => 'zh-cn',
  'HTTP_CONNECTION' => 'keep-alive',
  'HTTP_ACCEPT' => '*/*',
  'HTTP_USER_AGENT' => 'FBiOSSDK.3.22.0',
  'PATH' => '/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin',
  'SERVER_SIGNATURE' => '<address>Apache/2.4.7 (Ubuntu) Server at graph.facebook.com Port 443</address>',
  'SERVER_SOFTWARE' => 'Apache/2.4.7 (Ubuntu)',
  'SERVER_NAME' => 'graph.facebook.com',
  'SERVER_ADDR' => 'deleted',
  'SERVER_PORT' => '443',
  'REMOTE_ADDR' => '223.100.159.96',
  'DOCUMENT_ROOT' => 'deletd',
  'REQUEST_SCHEME' => 'https',
  'CONTEXT_PREFIX' => '',
  'CONTEXT_DOCUMENT_ROOT' => 'deleted',
  'SERVER_ADMIN' => 'deleted',
  'SCRIPT_FILENAME' => 'deleted',
  'REMOTE_PORT' => '24797',
  'REDIRECT_QUERY_STRING' => 'fields=name,supports_implicit_sdk_logging,gdpv4_nux_enabled,gdpv4_nux_content,ios_dialog_configs,app_events_feature_bitmask&format=json&sdk=ios',
  'REDIRECT_URL' => '/v2.2/1493038024241481',
  'GATEWAY_INTERFACE' => 'CGI/1.1',
  'SERVER_PROTOCOL' => 'HTTP/1.1',
  'REQUEST_METHOD' => 'GET',
  'QUERY_STRING' => 'fields=name,supports_implicit_sdk_logging,gdpv4_nux_enabled,gdpv4_nux_content,ios_dialog_configs,app_events_feature_bitmask&format=json&sdk=ios',
  'REQUEST_URI' => '/v2.2/1493038024241481?fields=name,supports_implicit_sdk_logging,gdpv4_nux_enabled,gdpv4_nux_content,ios_dialog_configs,app_events_feature_bitmask&format=json&sdk=ios',
  'SCRIPT_NAME' => '/index.php',
  'PHP_SELF' => '/index.php',
  'REQUEST_TIME_FLOAT' => 1422528399.4159999,
  'REQUEST_TIME' => 1422528399,
)

So that was it, connections were arriving to the Server/Load Balancer requesting addresses from Google, Facebook, thepiratebay main tracker, etc… tens of thousands of users simultaneously.

Clearly there was a kind of DNS spoofing attack. And looking at the ACCEPT_LANGUAGE I saw that clients were using Chineses language (zh-cn).

Changing the ip address will take some time, as some dns have 1 hour or several hours of TTL to improve page speed of customers, and both ip’s have to coexist for a while until all the client’s dns have refreshed, browsers have refreshed their cache of dns names, and dns of partners consuming our APIs have refreshed.

You can have a virtual host just blank, but for some projects your virtual hosts needs to listen for all the request, for example, imagine that you serve contents like barcelona.yourdomain.com and for newyork.yourdomain.com and whatever-changing.yourdomain.com like carlesmateo.yourdomaincom, anotheruser.yourdomain.com, anyuserwilhaveownurl.yourdomain.com, that your code process to get the information and render the pages, so it is not always possible to have a default one.

First thing I had to do was, as the attack came from the ip, was to do not allow any host requests that did not belong to the hosts served. That way my framework will not process any request that was not for the exact domains that I expect, and I will save the 404 process time.

Also, if the servers return a white page with few bytes (header), this will harm less the bandwidth if under a DDoS. The bandwidth available is one of the weak points when suffering a DDoS.

To block hosts that are not expected there are several things that can be done, for example:

Nginx can easily block those requests not matching the hosts.
Modify my script to look at
```
HTTP_HOST
```
So:
if (isset($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']) && ($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] != 'www.mydomain.com' && $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] != 'mydomain.com') { exit(); }
That way any request that is not for the exact domain will be halted quickly.
You can also check instead strpost($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'], ‘mydomain.com’) for variable HTTP_HOST
Create an Apache default virtual host and default ssl. With a white page the load was so small that even tens of thousands ip’s cannot affect enough the server. (Max load was around 2.5%)

Optimization: If you want to save IOPS and network bandwidth to the storage you can create a ramdisk, and have the index.html of the default virtual host in there. This will increase server speed and reduce overhead.

If you’re in a hurry to stop the attack you can also:

Change the Ip, get a new ip address, and change the dns to the new ip, and hope this one is not attacked
An emergency solution, drastic but effective, would be to block entire China’s ip ranges.

Some of the webs I helped reported having attacks from outside China, but nothing related, the gross attacks, 99%, come from China.

Sadly Amazon’s Cloud Firewall does not allow to deny certain ip addresses, only allow services through a default deny policy.

I reopened the firewall in 80 and 443, so traffic to everyone, checked that the Service was Ok and continued my way to the office.

When later I spoke with some friends, one of them told me about the Chinese government firewall causing this sort of problems worldwide!. Look at this interesting article.

http://blog.sucuri.net/2015/01/ddos-from-china-facebook-wordpress-and-twitter-users-receiving-sucuri-error-pages.html

It is not clear if those DDoS attacks are caused by the Chinese Firewall, by a bug, or by pirates exploiting it to attack sites for money. But is clear that all those attacks and traffic comes from China ip addresses. Obviously this DNS issues are causing the guys browsing on China to not being able of browsing Facebook, WordPres, twitter, etc…

Here you can see live the origin of the world DDoS attacks:

http://www.digitalattackmap.com/#anim=1&color=0&country=ALL&list=0&time=16465&view=map

And China being the source of most of the DDoS attacks.

Stopping a BitTorrent DDoS attack

After all the success about the article stopping an XMLRPC to WordPress site attack and thanks messages (I actually helped a company that was being thrown down every day and asked me for help) it’s the moment to explain how to stop an attack much more heavily in evilness.

The first sign I saw was that the server was more and more slower, what is nearly impossible as I setup a very good server, and it has a lot of good development techniques to not having bottlenecks.

I looked at the server and I saw like 3,000 SYN_SENT packets. Apparently we were under a SYN Flood attack.

netstat revealed more than 6k different ip addresses connecting to the Server.

Server had only 30 GB of RAM so, and started to be full, with more and more connections, and so more Apache processes to respond to the real users fast it was clear that it was going to struggle.

I improved the configuration of the Apache so the Server would be able to handle much more connections with less memory consumption and overhead, added some enhancements for blocking SYN Flood attacks, and restarted the Apache Server.

I reduced greatly the scope of the attacks but I knew that it would only be being worst. I was buying time while not disrupting the functioning of the website.

The next hours the attacks increased to having around 7,500 concurrent connections simultaneously. The memory was reaching its limits, so I decided it was time to upgrade the instance. I doubled the memory and added much more cores, to 36, by using one of the newest Amazon c4.8xlarge.

The good thing about Cloud is that you pay for the time you use the resources. So when the waters calm down again, I’m able to reduce the size of the instance and save some hundreds to the company.

I knew it was a matter of time. The server was stabilized at using 40 GB out of the 60 GB but I knew the pirates will keep trying to shutdown the service.

Once the SYN Flood was stopped and I was sure that the service was safe for a while, I was checking the logs to see if I can detect a pattern among the attacks. I did.

Most request that we were receiving where to a file called announce.php that obviously does not exist in the server, and so it was returning 404 error.

The user agent reported in many cases BitTorrent, or Torrent compatible product, and the url sending a hash, uploaded, downloaded, left… so I realized that somehow my Server was targeted by a Torrent attack, where they indicated that the Server was a Torrent tracker.

As the .htacess in frameworks like Laravel, Catalonia Framework… and CMS like WordPress, Joomla, ezpublish… try to read the file from filesystem and if it doesn’t exist index.php is served, then as first action I created a file /announce.php that simple did an exit();

Sample .htaccess from Laravel:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
    <IfModule mod_negotiation.c>
        Options -MultiViews
    </IfModule>

    RewriteEngine On

    # Redirect Trailing Slashes...
    RewriteRule ^(.*)/$ /$1 [L,R=301]

    # Handle Front Controller...
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
    RewriteRule ^ index.php [L]
</IfModule>

Sample code for announce.php would be like:

<?php
/**
 * Creator: Carles Mateo
 * Date: 2015-01-21 Time: 09:39
 */

// A cheap way to stop an attack based on requesting this file
http_response_code(406);
exit();

The response_code 406 was an attemp to see if the BitTorrent clients were sensible to headers and stop. But they didn’t.

With with simple addition of announce.php , with exit(), I achieved reducing the load on the Server from 90% to 40% in just one second.

The reason why a not found page was causing so many damage was that as the 404 error page from the Server is personalized, and offers alternative results (assuming the product you was looking for is no longer available), and before displaying all the Framework is loaded and the routes are checked to see if the url fits and so has some process to be done in the PHP side (it takes 100 ms to reply, is not much, but it was not necessary to waste so much CPU), even being very optimized, every single not found url was causing certain process and CPU waste. Since the attack had more than 7,000 different ip’s simultaneously coming to the Server it would be somewhat a problem at certain point and start returning 500 errors to the customers.

The logs were also showing other patterns, for example:

announce?info_hash…

So without the PHP extension. Those kind of requests would not go through my wall file announce.php but though index.php (as .htaccess tells what is not found is directed there).

I could change the .htaccess to send those requests to hell, but I wanted a more definitive solution, something that would prevent the Server from wasting CPU and the Servers to being able to resist an attack x1000 times harder.

At the end the common pattern was that the BitTorrent clients were requesting via GET a parameter called info_hash, so I blocked through there all the request.

I wrote this small program, and added it to index.php

// Patch urgency Carles to stop an attack based on Torrent
// http://blog.carlesmateo.com
if (isset($_GET['info_hash'])) {

    // In case you use CDN, proxy, or load balancer
    $s_ip_proxy = '';

    $s_ip_address = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];


    // Warning if you use a CDN, a proxy server or a load balancer do not add the ip to the blacklisted
    if ($s_ip_proxy == '' || ($s_ip_proxy != '' && $s_ip_address != $s_ip_proxy)) {
        $s_date = date('Y-m-d');

        $s_ip_log_file = '/tmp/ip-to-blacklist-'.$s_date.'.log';
        file_put_contents($s_ip_log_file, $s_ip_address."\n", FILE_APPEND | LOCK_EX);
    }


    // 406 means 'Not Acceptable'
    http_response_code(406);
    exit();
}

Please note, this code can be added to any Software like Zend Framework, Symfony, Catalonia Framework, Joomla, WordPress, Drupal, ezpublish, Magento… just add those lines at the beginning of the public/index.php just before the action of the Framework starts. Only be careful that after a core update, you’ll have to reapply it.

After that I deleted the no-longer-needed announced.php

What the program does is, if you don’t have defined a proxy/CDN ip, to write the ip connecting with the Torrent request pattern to a log file called for example:

/tmp/ip-to-blacklist-2015-01-23.log

And also exit(), so stopping the execution and saving many CPU cycles.

The idea of the final date is to blacklist the ip’s only for 24 hours as we later will see.

With this I achieved reducing the CPU consumption to around 5-15% of CPU.

Then, there is the other part of stopping the attack, that is a bash program, that can be run from command line or added to cron to be launched, depending on the volume of the attacks, every 5 minutes, or every hour.

ip_blacklist.sh

#!/bin/bash
# Ip blacklister by Carles Mateo
s_DATE=$(date +%Y-%m-%d)
s_FILE=/tmp/ip-to-blacklist-$s_DATE.log
s_FILE_UNIQUE=/tmp/ip-to-blacklist-$s_DATE-unique.log
cat $s_FILE | sort | uniq > $s_FILE_UNIQUE

echo "Counting the ip addresses to block in $s_FILE_UNIQUE"
cat $s_FILE_UNIQUE | wc -l

sleep 3
# We clear the iptables rules
iptables -F
iptables -X
iptables -t nat -F
iptables -t nat -X
iptables -t mangle -F
iptables -t mangle -X
iptables -P INPUT ACCEPT
iptables -P FORWARD ACCEPT
iptables -P OUTPUT ACCEPT

# To list the rules sudo iptables -L
# /sbin/iptables -L INPUT -v -n
# Enable ssh for all (you can add a Firewall at Cloud provider level or enstrict the rule to your ip)
sudo iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport ssh -j ACCEPT

for s_ip_address in `cat $s_FILE_UNIQUE`
do
    echo "Blocking traffic from $s_ip_address"
    sudo iptables -A INPUT -s $s_ip_address -p tcp --destination-port 80 -j DROP
    sudo iptables -A INPUT -s $s_ip_address -p tcp --destination-port 443 -j DROP
done

# Ensure Accept traffic on Port 80 (HTTP) and 443 (HTTPS)
sudo iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT
sudo iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 443 -j ACCEPT

# To block the rest
# sudo iptables -A INPUT -j DROP

# User iptables -save and iptables -restore to make this changes permanent
# sudo sh -c "iptables-save > /etc/iptables.rules"
# sudo pre-up iptables-restore < /etc/iptables.rules
# https://help.ubuntu.com/community/IptablesHowTo

This scripts gets the list of ip’s addresses, gets the list of unique ip’s into another file, and then makes a loop and adds all of them to the iptables, the Firewall from Linux, and blocks them for accessing the web at port 80 (http) or 443 (https, ssl). You can block all the ports also if you want for those ip’s.

With this CPU use went to 0%.

Note: One of my colleagues, a wonderful SysAdmin at Ackstorm ISP, points that some of you may prefer using REJECT instead of DROP. An interesting conversation on serverfault about this.

After fixing the problem I looked over the Internet to locate any people reporting attacks like what I suffered. The most interesting I found was this article: BotTorrent: Misusing BitTorrent to Launch DDoS Attacks, from University of California, Irvine. (local copy on this website BotTorrent)

Basically any site on the Internet can be attacked at a large scale, as every user downloading Torrent will try to connect to the innocent Server to inform of the progress of the down/upload. If this attack is performed with hundreds of files, the attack means hundreds of thousands of ip’s connecting to the Server… the server will run out of connections, or memory, or bandwidth will be full from the bad traffic.

I saw that the attackers were using porno files that were highly downloaded and apparently telling the Torrent network that our Server was a Torrent tracker, so corroborating my hypothesis all the people downloading Torrents were sending updates to our Server, believing that our Server was a tracker. A trick from the sad pirates.

Some people, business users, asked me who could be interested in injuring other’s servers or disrupting other’s businesses without any immediate gain (like controlling your Servers to send Spam).

I told:

Competitors that hate you because you’re successful and want to disrupt your business (they pay to the pirates for doing attacks. I’ve helped companies that were let down by those pirates)
Investors that may want to buy you at a cheaper price (after badly trolling you for a week or two)
False “security” companies that will offer their services “casually” when you most need them and charge a high bill
Pirates that want to extort you

So bad people that instead that using their talent to create, just destroy and act bad being evil to others.

In other cases could be bad luck to have been assigned an Ip that previously had a Torrent tracker, it has not much sense for the Cloud as it is expensive, but it has that a Server with that ip was hacked and used as tracked for a while.

Also governments could be so wanting to disrupt services (like torrent) by clumsy redirecting dns to random ip’s, or entertainment companies trying to shutdown Torrent trackers could try to poison dns to stop users from using Bittorrent.

See the definitive solution in the next article.

Stopping and investigating a WordPress xmlrpc.php attack

One of my Servers got heavily attacked for several days. I describe here the steps I took to stop this.

The attack consisted in several connections per second to the Server, to path /xmlrpc.php.

This is a WordPress file to control the pingback, when someone links to you.

My Server it is a small Amazon instance, a m1.small with only one core and 1,6 GB RAM, magnetic disks and that scores a discrete 203 CMIPS (my slow laptop scores 460 CMIPS).

Those massive connections caused the server to use more and more RAM, and while the xmlrpc requests were taking many seconds to reply, so more and more processes of Apache were spawned. That lead to more memory consumption, and to use all the available RAM and start using swap, with a heavy performance impact until all the memory was exhausted and the mysql processes stopped.

I saw that I was suffering an attack after the shutdown of MySql. I checked the CloudWatch Statistics from Amazon AWS and it was clear that I was receiving many -out of normal- requests. The I/O was really high too.

This statistics are from today to three days ago, look at the spikes when the attack was hitting hard and how relaxed the Server is now (plain line).

First I decided to simply rename the xmlrpc.php file as a quick solution to stop the attack but the number of http connections kept growing and then I saw very suspicious queries to the database.

Those queries, in addition to what I’ve seen in the Apache’s error log suggested me that may be the Server was hacked by a WordPress/plugin bug and that now they were trying to hide from the database’s logs. (Specially the DELETE FROM wp_useronline WHERE user_ip = the Ip of the attacker)

[Tue Aug 26 11:47:08 2014] [error] [client 94.102.49.179] Error in WordPress Database Lost connection to MySQL server during query a la consulta SELECT option_value FROM wp_options WHERE option_name = 'uninstall_plugins' LIMIT 1 feta per include('wp-load.php'), require_once('wp-config.php'), require_once('wp-settings.php'), include_once('/plugins/captcha/captcha.php'), register_uninstall_hook, get_option
[Tue Aug 26 11:47:09 2014] [error] [client 94.102.49.179] Error in WordPress Database Lost connection to MySQL server during query a la consulta SELECT option_value FROM wp_options WHERE option_name = 'uninstall_plugins' LIMIT 1 feta per include('wp-load.php'), require_once('wp-config.php'), require_once('wp-settings.php'), include_once('/plugins/captcha/captcha.php'), register_uninstall_hook, get_option
[Tue Aug 26 11:47:10 2014] [error] [client 94.102.49.179] Error in WordPress Database Lost connection to MySQL server during query a la consulta SELECT option_value FROM wp_options WHERE option_name = 'widget_wppp' LIMIT 1 feta per include('wp-load.php'), require_once('wp-config.php'), require_once('wp-settings.php'), do_action('plugins_loaded'), call_user_func_array, wppp_check_upgrade, get_option

The error log was very ugly.

The access log was not reassuring, as it shown many attacks like that:

94.102.49.179 - - [26/Aug/2014:10:34:58 +0000] "POST /xmlrpc.php HTTP/1.0" 200 598 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible: MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0)"
94.102.49.179 - - [26/Aug/2014:10:34:59 +0000] "POST /xmlrpc.php HTTP/1.0" 200 598 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible: MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0)"
127.0.0.1 - - [26/Aug/2014:10:35:09 +0000] "OPTIONS * HTTP/1.0" 200 126 "-" "Apache/2.2.22 (Ubuntu) (internal dummy connection)"
94.102.49.179 - - [26/Aug/2014:10:34:59 +0000] "POST /xmlrpc.php HTTP/1.0" 200 598 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible: MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0)"
94.102.49.179 - - [26/Aug/2014:10:34:59 +0000] "POST /xmlrpc.php HTTP/1.0" 200 598 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible: MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0)"
94.102.49.179 - - [26/Aug/2014:10:35:00 +0000] "POST /xmlrpc.php HTTP/1.0" 200 598 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible: MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0)"
94.102.49.179 - - [26/Aug/2014:10:34:59 +0000] "POST /xmlrpc.php HTTP/1.0" 200 598 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible: MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0)"

Was difficult to determine if the Server was receiving SQL injections so I wanted to be sure.

Note: The connection from 127.0.0.1 with OPTIONS is created by Apache when spawns another Apache.

As I had super fresh backups in another Server I was not afraid of the attack dropping the database.

I was a bit suspicious also because the /readme.html file mentioned that the version of WordPress is 3.6. In other installations it tells correctly that the version is the 3.9.2 and this file is updated with the auto-update. I was thinking about a possible very sophisticated trojan attack able to modify wp-includes/version.php and set fake $wp_version = ‘3.9.2’;
Later I realized that this blog had WordPress in Catalan, my native language, and discovered that the guys that do the translations forgot to update this file (in new installations it comes not updated, and so showing 3.6). I have alerted them.

In fact later I did a diff of all the files of my WordPress installation against the official WordPress 3.9.2-ca and later a did a diff between the WordPress 3.9.2-ca and the WordPress 3.9.2 (English – default), and found no differences. My Server was Ok. But at this point, at the beginning of the investigation I didn’t know that yet.

With the info I had (queries, times, attack, readme telling v. 3.6…) I balanced the possibility to be in front of something and I decided that I had an unique opportunity to discover how they do to inject those Sql, or discover if my Server was compromised and how. The bad point is that it was the same Amazon’s Server where this blog resides, and I wanted the attack to continue so I could get more information, so during two days I was recording logs and doing some investigations, so sorry if you visited my blog and database was down, or the Server was going extremely slow. I needed that info. It was worth it.

First I changed the Apache config so the massive connections impacted a bit less the Server and so I could work on it while the attack was going on.

I informed my group of Senior friends on what’s going on and two SysAdmins gave me some good suggestions on other logs to watch and on how to stop the attack, and later a Developer joined me to look at the logs and pointed possible solutions to stop the attack. But basically all of them suggested on how to block the incoming connections with iptables and to do things like reinstalling WordPress, disabling xmlrpc.php in .htaccess, changing passwords or moving wp-admin/ to another place, but the point is that I wanted to understand exactly what was going on and how.

I checked the logs, certificates, etc… and no one other than me was accessing the Server. I also double-checked the Amazon’s Firewall to be sure that no unnecessary ports were left open. Everything was Ok.

I took a look at the Apache logs for the site and all the attacks were coming from the same Ip:

94.102.49.179

It is an Ip from a dedicated Servers company called ecatel.net. I reported them the abuse to the abuse address indicated in the ripe.net database for the range.

I found that many people have complains about this provider and reports of them ignoring the requests to stop the spam use from their servers, so I decided that after my tests I will block their entire network from being able to access my sites.

All the requests shown in the access.log pointed to requests to /xmlrpc.php. It was the only path requested by the attacker so that Ip did nothing more apparently.

I added some logging to WordPress xmlrpc.php file:

if ($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] == '94.102.49.179') {
    error_log('XML POST: '.serialize($_POST));
    error_log('XML GET: '.serialize($_GET));
    error_log('XML REQUEST: '.serialize($_REQUEST));
    error_log('XML SERVER: '.serialize($_SERVER));
    error_log('XML FILES: '.serialize($_FILES));
    error_log('XML ENV: '.serialize($_ENV));
    error_log('XML RAW: '.$HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA);
    error_log('XML ALL_HEADERS: '.serialize(getallheaders()));
}

This was the result, it is always the same:

[Fri Aug 29 19:02:54 2014] [error] [client 94.102.49.179] XML POST: a:0:{}
[Fri Aug 29 19:02:54 2014] [error] [client 94.102.49.179] XML GET: a:0:{}
[Fri Aug 29 19:02:54 2014] [error] [client 94.102.49.179] XML REQUEST: a:0:{}
[Fri Aug 29 19:02:54 2014] [error] [client 94.102.49.179] XML SERVER: a:24:{s:9:"HTTP_HOST";s:24:"barcelona.afterstart.com";s:12:"CONTENT_TYPE";s:8:"text/xml";s:14:"CONTENT_LENGTH";s:3:"287";s:15:"HTTP_USER_AGENT";s:50:"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible: MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0)";s:15:"HTTP_CONNECTION";s:5:"close";s:4:"PATH";s:28:"/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin";s:16:"SERVER_SIGNATURE";s:85:"<address>Apache/2.2.22 (Ubuntu) Server at barcelona.afterstart.com Port 80</address>\n";s:15:"SERVER_SOFTWARE";s:22:"Apache/2.2.22 (Ubuntu)";s:11:"SERVER_NAME";s:24:"barcelona.afterstart.com";s:11:"SERVER_ADDR";s:14:"[this-is-removed]";s:11:"SERVER_PORT";s:2:"80";s:11:"REMOTE_ADDR";s:13:"94.102.49.179";s:13:"DOCUMENT_ROOT";s:29:"/var/www/barcelona.afterstart.com";s:12:"SERVER_ADMIN";s:19:"webmaster@localhost";s:15:"SCRIPT_FILENAME";s:40:"/var/www/barcelona.afterstart.com/xmlrpc.php";s:11:"REMOTE_PORT";s:5:"40225";s:17:"GATEWAY_INTERFACE";s:7:"CGI/1.1";s:15:"SERVER_PROTOCOL";s:8:"HTTP/1.0";s:14:"REQUEST_METHOD";s:4:"POST";s:12:"QUERY_STRING";s:0:"";s:11:"REQUEST_URI";s:11:"/xmlrpc.php";s:11:"SCRIPT_NAME";s:11:"/xmlrpc.php";s:8:"PHP_SELF";s:11:"/xmlrpc.php";s:12:"REQUEST_TIME";i:1409338974;}
[Fri Aug 29 19:02:54 2014] [error] [client 94.102.49.179] XML FILES: a:0:{}
[Fri Aug 29 19:02:54 2014] [error] [client 94.102.49.179] XML ENV: a:0:{}
[Fri Aug 29 19:02:54 2014] [error] [client 94.102.49.179] XML RAW: <?xmlversion="1.0"?><methodCall><methodName>pingback.ping</methodName><params><param><value><string>http://seretil.me/</string></value></param><param><value><string>http://barcelona.afterstart.com/2013/09/27/afterstart-barcelona-2013-09-26/</string></value></param></params></methodCall>
[Fri Aug 29 19:02:54 2014] [error] [client 94.102.49.179] XML ALL_HEADERS: a:5:{s:4:"Host";s:24:"barcelona.afterstart.com";s:12:"Content-type";s:8:"text/xml";s:14:"Content-length";s:3:"287";s:10:"User-agent";s:50:"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible: MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0)";s:10:"Connection";s:5:"close";}

So nothing in $_POST, nothing in $_GET, nothing in $_REQUEST, nothing in $_SERVER, no files submitted, but a text/xml Posted (that was logged by storing: $HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA):

<?xmlversion="1.0"?><methodCall><methodName>pingback.ping</methodName><params><param><value><string>http://seretil.me/</string></value></param><param><value><string>http://barcelona.afterstart.com/2013/09/27/afterstart-barcelona-2013-09-26/</string></value></param></params></methodCall>

I show you in a nicer formatted aspect:So basically they were trying to register a link to seretil dot me.

I tried and this page, hosted in CloudFare, is not working.

The problem is that responding to this spam xmlrpc request took around 16 seconds to the Server. And I was receiving several each second.

I granted access to my Ip only on the port 80 in the Firewall, restarted Apache, restarted MySql and submitted the same malicious request to the Server, and it even took 16 seconds in all my tests:

cat http_post.txt | nc barcelona.afterstart.com 80

I checked and confirmed that the logs from the attacker were showing the same Content-Length and http code.

Other guys tried xml request as well but did one time or two and leaved.

The problem was that this robot was, and still sending many requests per second for days.

May be the idea was to knock down my Server, but I doubted it as the address selected is the blog of one Social Event for Senior Internet Talents that I organize: afterstart.com. It has not special interest, I do not see a political, hateful or other motivation to attack the blog from this project.

Ok, at this point it was clear that the Ip address was a robot, probably running from an infected or hacked Server, and was trying to publish a Spam link to a site (that was down). I had to clarify those strange queries in the logs.

I reviewed the WPUsersOnline plugin and I saw that the strange queries (and inefficient) that I saw belonged to WPUsersOnline plugin.

The thing was that when I renamed the xmlrpc.php the spamrobot was still posting to that file. According to WordPress .htaccess file any file that is not found on the filesystem is redirected to index.php.

So what was happening is that all the massive requests sent to xmlrpc.php were being attended by index.php, then showing an error message that page not found, but the WPUsersOnline plugin was deleting those connections. And was doing it many times, overloading also the Database.

Also I was able to reproduce the behaviour by myself, isolating by firewalling the WebServer from other Ips other than mine and doing the same post by myself many times per second.

I checked against a friend’s blog but in his Server xmlrpc.php responds in 1,5 seconds. My friend’s Server is a Digital Ocean Virtual Server with 2 cores and SSD Disks. My magnetic disks on Amazon only bring around 40 MB/second. I’ve to check in detail why my friend’s Server responds so much faster.

Checked the integrity of my databases, just in case, and were perfect. Nothing estrange with collations and the only errors in the /var/log/mysql/error.log was due to MySql crashing when the Server ran out of memory.

Rechecked in my Server, now it takes 12 seconds.

I disabled 80% of the plugins but the times were the same. The Statistics show how the things changed -see the spikes before I definitively patched the Server to block request from that Spam-robot ip, to the left-.

I checked against another WordPress that I have in the same Server and it only takes 1,5 seconds to reply. So I decided to continue investigating why this WordPress took so long to reply.

As I said before I checked that the files from my WordPress installation were the same as the original distribution, and they were. Having discarded different files the thing had to be in the database.

Even when I checked the MySql it told me that all the tables were OK, having seen that the WPUserOnline deletes all the registers older than 5 minutes, I guessed that this could lead to fragmentation, so I decided to do OPTIMIZE TABLE on all the tables of the database for the WordPress failing, with InnoDb it is basically recreating the Tables and the Indexes.

I tried then the call via RPC and my Server replied in three seconds. Much better.

Looking with htop, when I call the xmlrpc.php the CPU uses between 50% and 100%.

I checked the logs and the robot was gone. He leaved or the provider finally blocked the Server. I don’t know.

Everything became clear, it was nothing more than a sort of coincidences together. Deactivating the plugin the DELETE queries disappeared, even under heavy load of the Server.

It only was remain to clarify why when I send a call to xmlrpc to this blog, it replies in 1,5 seconds, and when I request to the Barcelona.afterstart.com it takes 3 seconds.

I activated the log of queries in mysql. To do that edit /etc/mysql/my.cnf and uncomment:

general_log_file        = /var/log/mysql/mysql.log
general_log             = 1

Then I checked the queries, and in the case of my blog it performs many less queries, as I was requesting to pingback to an url that was not existing, and WordPress does this query:

SELECT   wp_posts.* FROM wp_posts  WHERE 1=1  AND ( ( YEAR( post_date ) = 2013 AND MONTH( post_date ) = 9 AND DAYOFMONTH( post_date ) = 27 ) ) AND wp_posts.post_name = 'afterstart-barcelona-2013-09-26-meet' AND wp_posts.post_type = 'post'  ORDER BY wp_posts.post_date DESC

As the url afterstart-barcelona-2013-09-26-meet with the dates indicated does not exist in my other blog, the execution ends there and does not perform the rest of the queries, that in the case of Afterstart blog were:

40 Query     SELECT post_id, meta_key, meta_value FROM wp_postmeta WHERE post_id IN (81) ORDER BY meta_id ASC
40 Query     SELECT ID, post_name, post_parent, post_type
FROM wp_posts
WHERE post_name IN ('http%3a','','seretil-me')
AND post_type IN ('page','attachment')
40 Query     SELECT   wp_posts.* FROM wp_posts  WHERE 1=1  AND (wp_posts.ID = '0') AND wp_posts.post_type = 'page'  ORDER BY wp_posts.post_date DESC
40 Query     SELECT * FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_post_ID = 81 AND comment_author_url = 'http://seretil.me/'

To confirm my theory I tried the request to my blog, with a valid url, and it lasted for 3-4 seconds, the same than Afterstart’s blog. Finally I double-checked with the blog of my friend and was slower than before. I got between 1,5 and 6 seconds, with a lot of 2 seconds response. (he has PHP 5.5 and OpCache that improves a bit, but the problem is in the queries to the database)

Honestly, the guys creating WordPress should cache this queries instead of performing 20 live queries, that are always the same, before returning the error message. Using Cache Lite or Stash, or creating an InMemory table for using as Cache, or of course allowing the use of Memcached would eradicate the DoS component of this kind of attacks. As the xmlrpc pingback feature hits the database with a lot of queries to end not allowing the publishing.

While I was finishing those tests (remember that the attacker ip has gone) another attacker from the same network tried, but I had patched the Server to ignore it:

94.102.52.157 - - [31/Aug/2014:02:06:16 +0000] "POST /xmlrpc.php HTTP/1.0" 200 189 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible: MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0)"

This was trying to get a link published to a domain called socksland dot net that is a domain registered in Russia and which page is not working.

As I had all the information I wanted I finally blocked the network from the provider to access my Server ever again.

Unfortunatelly Amazon’s Firewall does not allow to block a certain Ip or range.
So you can block at Iptables level or in .htaccess file or in the code.
I do not recommend blocking at code level because sadly WordPress has many files accessible from outside so you would have to add your code at the beginning of all the files and because when there is a WordPress version update you’ll loss all your customizations.
But I recommend proceeding to patch your code to avoid certain Ip’s if you use a CDN. As the POST will be sent directly to your Server, and the Ip’s are Ip’s from the CDN -and you can’t block them-. You have to look at the Header: X-Forwarded-For that indicates the Ip’s the proxies have passed by, and also the Client’s Ip.

I designed a program that is able to patch any PHP project to check for blacklisted Ip’s (even though a proxy) with minimal performance impact. It works with WordPress, drupal, joomla, ezpublish and Framework like Zend, Symfony, Catalonia… and I patched my code to block those unwanted robot’s requests.

A solution that will work for you probably is to disable the pingback functionality, there are several plugins that do that. Disabling completely xmlrpc is not recommended as WordPress uses it for several things (JetPack, mobile, validation…)

The same effect as adding the plugin that disables the xmlrpc pingback can be achieved by editing the functions.php from your Theme and adding:

add_filter( 'xmlrpc_methods', 'remove_xmlrpc_pingback_ping' );
function remove_xmlrpc_pingback_ping( $methods ) {
    unset( $methods['pingback.ping'] );
    
    return $methods;
}

Update: 2016-02-24 14:40 CEST
I got also a heavy dictionary attack against wp-login.php .Despite having a Captcha plugin, that makes it hard to hack, it was generating some load on the system.
What I did was to rename the wp-login.php to another name, like wp-login-carles.php and in wp-login.php having a simply exit();

<?php
exit();

Take in count that this will work only until WordPress is updated to the next version. Then you have to reapply the renaming trick.