AT&T caused a flurry of fury when they blocked a server from the online forum, 4chan.
On this episode of Hacks, we'll look at the DoS attack against 4Chan and how and why AT&T reacted.
The trouble started with neither AT&T nor 4Chan. A third party attacker, possibly a rival forum, started
a Denial of Service attack known as TCP SYN flooding, or SYN attack.
First let's look at what's supposed to happen when you request a Web page.
Your computer let's call it HOME sends a SYN request to the Web Server, (SYN for Synchronize
sequence numbers) in this case the server is img.4chan.org. 4Chan's server responds with an ACK flag
(short for acknowledge) and then your computer responds with a SYN-ACK and from there the
connection is made.
In 4Chan's case, the Attacker sent SYN requests with spoofed IP addresses. In other words the
requests appeared to come from some other computer or computers, for this example let's call it
127.55.55.127.
4Chan's server responded with an ACK, but since 127.55.55.127 never sent the SYN in the first place, it
either sends an RST flag or more likely, nothing at all. And if 4CHAN gets nothing at all it may send 4 or
5 ACKs for every SYN it receives. This whole senario can take around 3 minutes to play out.
So now you can see the problem. If the attacker is sending a bunch of SYN's from a bunch of spoofed
addresses, the attacked server is going to run out of resources responding to them. The flood of
traffic, not only fills up 4Chan, but also floods innocent bystanders.
In 4Chan's case, some of these bystanders were in the AT&T network. Some were in other networks
like unWired Broadband. But since AT&T is the big kahuna, they got all the attention.
AT&T blocked all traffic coming from the 4Chan server sending out the ACK flags. This stopped the
ACKs from flooding into AT&T's network, but also prevented any legitimate requests from their
network to that 4Chan server.
A few AT&T subscribers who suddenly couldn't get to 4Chan, figured AT&T was blocking the often
controversial site. So they started grumbling.
4Chan complained that AT&T should have only filtered their server for the sites who had been
spoofed. However, if AT&T had done that, and the attackers caught on, they could spoofed different
IP addresses. AT&T was taking the rather cautious approach of blocking the entire server, making it
irrelevant what IP addresses were spoofed.
4Chan did filter the DoS attack so that it didn't bring down their site, but they were still passing along
the ACK requests which caused the trouble.
Once they stopped that from happening, AT&T lifted the ban on img.4chan.org, and all went back to
the peaceful happy land it had been before. Sort of. Well, except for the CNN iReport 4Chan users
put up claiming the AT&T CEO was dead.
Hope that sheds some light on the shenanigans of the weekend of July 26th, 2009. I'm Tom Merritt,
CNET.com.
