If you don't directly connect or peer with them, have you tried going
through your upstream provider to get a trouble ticket referral for their
NOC? AT&T has been very good about providing the secret code-word and
telephone number to their direct inter-connects and peers in the past.
SprintLink is our upstream. After three hours they called back and
said that I "have to contact the Computer Crimes Division of the
FBI". Since the attempts stoped hours ago, I'm just going to pay
close attention to my logs and follow up if it happens again.
Someone apparently from a WorldNet dial-up account, calling in via
New Orleans and Dallas was sending large numbers of TCP connections
to port 1080. That's of course the default Socks Port. We don't run
socks. Never have. The connection attempts were blocked and logged.
The reasons could be:
1) stupid user entered in the wrong address for a socks proxy
2) Denial of Service attack
It if were #1, then why would it be coming from two different cities
and why sooooo many connections. If it was #2, why am I not seeing
more connections and why TCP? IT seems to me that it's kinda
pointless to spoof the source address on a TCP connection unless you
are *very* clever. Why only port 1080?
--Eric
To answer your question about #1, we backhaul our dial-in calls all
over the place. The same user dialling back in to the same number could
easily end up in one of three or four IP blocks which are in turn
associated with different cities in the DNS.
Jonathan