Friday, October 11, 2002
An overheard conversation between system administrators whilst at lunch in a local bar and grill …
“I caught another customer spamming. Very annoying—took me nearly fifteen minutes to figure out how he was doing it before I could stop it.”
“I thought your company was friendly towards spammers?”
“I don't care what corporate says; if I catch someone spamming through our system, I'll cut them off. Of course, I couldn't just delete the account though.”
“Bummer.”
“But it did get sent to Abuse, and I nearly blocked their IP address from our system.”
“You didn't try mounting their drives and reformatting them?”
“That goes way beyond my ethics.”
“Even just wiping out their WINDOWS
directory, assuming
they are running Windwows?”
“Nope, wouldn't even do that.”
“What about changing their IP stack?”
“In what way?”
“So that, say, only localhost
reponds?”
“Hmmmm, I might have to give that some consideration.”
“Or seeing how the minimum IP header size is 20 bytes, changing their MTU to oh … say … 10 bytes?”
“Would it even work then?”
“I don't know, actually.”
“Would that even crash Linux?”
“You know, I don't know how any TCP/IP stack would deal with an MTU that small. A receiving host would probably just toss such a packet a way as being corrupted or just bad.”
“Yes, but what about the sending side?”
“Might be worth trying on the next spammer … ”