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I am having fun playing with the slow syn flood of spoofed packets someone is sending. I appreciate them sending it. I like the variability in the TCP MSS, TTL, Window sizes they are sending.

Thus far I am letting some leak through it would seem.

    100 SYN received in 15.03 seconds

    100 SYN-ACK returned in 3 minutes and 22.03 seconds.
Thus far 2388 requests to this confused-bots file have been let through and 3226 have been assumed to be bots.


Eventually ran out of things to play with. Actions taken:

- Blackhole routed a few ASN's / data-centers. It's all spoofed packets but good to block data-centers regardless so we are not sending them syn-ack (good hygiene).

- Added a temporary rule when we encounter a syn-flood. [1]

End result: Input 20 packets in 17 seconds, Output syn-ack reply 20 packets in 4 minutes and 44 seconds. That should translate to an acceptable amount of syn-ack if we were actually attacked some day.

Impact: Before, we sent more syn-ack then I would have liked but there was overall no impact to Nginx as we use the "deferred" socket option [2]. Now we send far fewer syn-ack packets for good internet hygiene. Thank-you to the person using the syn flood tool.

[1] - https://mirror.newsdump.org/nftables.txt

[2] - https://mirror.newsdump.org/nginx/http.d/11_bad_sni.conf.txt


On a funny side note, it seems that after blocking ASN's I ended up finding by coincidence this list of ASN's that are related in some way to StormWall [1]. Curious what that means. Perhaps they were trying to get me to add myself to a BGP GRE DDoS scrubbing list with the syn-ack packets. Well played if so! :-D

[1] - https://bgp.tools/as-set/RIPE::as-stormwall-set#reverse




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