Login attack on cyrus imap

Chris St. Pierre stpierre at NebrWesleyan.edu
Fri Nov 3 08:42:43 EST 2006


Take Ben's advice.  Use fail2ban, FUT, or any of the other programs
out there that are designed for this.  If the attacker is using a
single IP address, fail2ban (properly configured) should block them in
under a second.

There's probably a way to prevent Cyrus from taking too many
connections, but that still allows a DoS attack -- if the attacker is
using up all of your available connections, no real customer can get
on.  It also uses up a bunch of system resources, unnecessarily.
Don't limit the attacker -- ban them.

Chris St. Pierre
Unix Systems Administrator
Nebraska Wesleyan University

On Thu, 2 Nov 2006, Jim John wrote:

>I found out that it was a single IP from the log
>files. That person (or bot) logs into the POP3 server
>and tries to authenticate itself. The problem is that
>it logs in as a different user each time and does ALOT
>of these logins per second, causing LDAP to overload
>with connections. Is there any way to limit the number
>of connections in the cyrus server using some config
>parameter? Thanks.
>
>
>
> 
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