Penetration Testing: Raptor Firewall

["Stuart" <stuart.hackinfo () btinternet com>]

We've run a pentest against a customer recently and found that the very act
of port scanning their Raptor firewall (running on NT) crippled its ability
to accept incoming connections for their web site. The firewall is a new
high spec PIII and the least line is a decent size. The nmap scans were
standard timing (not T5 or anything daft) - once the scans were stopped,
things burst back in to life within about 10minutes.

This sounds like a lack of available connections type problem (similar to
SYN flooding) to me. The firewall was running at about 10% CPU usage at the
time and was not swapping to disk at all, also strangely, internal access
outbound to the net for web browsing seemed unaffected?

Its the latest version of Raptor and we're told its fully patched up to
date.

Does this ring any bells with anyone? Seems very odd to me... a portscan
should not cause a DOS by itself...


thanks
Stuart
IT Security Consultant, UK


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