Security Incidents mailing list archives

RE: Strange TCP headers


From: Robert Buckley <rbuckley () synapsemail com>
Date: Fri, 10 May 2002 12:00:32 -0400

pb,
        That is strange. Do you have some raw data to back up what pix is
saying. If you have an old IOS running there, it could very well be pix is
not reporting correctly. We need to verify this by looking at the actual raw
header, and see if it has options etc. I've caught a few people on my own
network using gnutella, which is prohibited by policy, but I've never seen
our pix's report bad header lengths on the traffic. 

-----Original Message-----
From: pbsarnac () ThoughtWorks com [mailto:pbsarnac () ThoughtWorks com]
Sent: Friday, May 10, 2002 11:40 AM
To: incidents () securityfocus com
Subject: Strange TCP headers


I just joined the list, and a quick search of the archives didn't turn this
up, but forgive me if this has already been discussed.

Starting on May 8 and continuing on through today, my firewall has been
picking up malformed TCP packets. The PIX complains about bad header
lengths, but the flag combinations that are showing up are extremely
strange. The source IP addresses are varied, and the destination IPs are
all NAT'd client workstations... not servers. The interesting thing is that
a majority of the scans are originating from port 6346, which snort.org
informs me is the gnutella server port. I've verified that at least two of
the clients that these packets were directed to were running various
file-sharing clients. Is this some sort of new scanning tool that runs over
the Gnutella network? Anyone have any thoughts?

(See attached file: 5-10-02-scans.txt)

Thanks!
Patrick Sarnacke

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