Re: SMTP probes
From: Neil Dickey (neil@geol.niu.edu)
Date: 04/05/03
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Date: Fri, 4 Apr 2003 23:09:04 -0600 (CST) From: Neil Dickey <neil@geol.niu.edu> To: incidents@securityfocus.com, rpuhek@etnsystems.com
Rich Puhek <rpuhek@etnsystems.com> wrote asking:
>Has anyone else noticed an upswing in port 25 probes over the last few days?
They aren't very common hereabouts, but I am seeing a few. Six months
ago there weren't any, and there hadn't been any literally for years.
>I'm seeing fairly large quantities of connections to port 25 (on the
>order of one every several seconds) with no real SMTP transations
>(logged by sendmail as "... did not issue MAIL/XPN/VRFY/ETRN during
>connection to MTA")
That's what the old "null connection" error looks like in newer versions
of Sendmail.
>Perhaps somethings probing for servers vulnerable to the recent sendmail
>problems?
Or looking for an open relay. There are probably too many of them still
out there.
>A quick look with ngrep seems to show that a typical connection doesn't
>send any data, just connects to port 25 and goes away.
Yes. You can duplicate the log message by telnetting to port 25 on
a machine running Sendmail, and then closing the connection without
issuing any commands. This will show you what the scanner is getting
out of that null connection -- the version of Sendmail you're running.
Best regards,
Neil Dickey, Ph.D.
Research Associate/Sysop
Geology Department
Northern Illinois University
DeKalb, Illinois
60115
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- Previous message: Jason Pagano: "RE: Logon.dll? Possible root-kit?"
- Maybe in reply to: Rich Puhek: "SMTP probes"
- Next in thread: Bojan Zdrnja: "Re: SMTP probes"
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