With the new HTTP reporting headers being developed and refined, it seems more important than ever to be able to tell/validate where the reports are coming from.
For example, someone attempting to "hack" the site can very easily flood the reporting endpoint with false reports, drowning out the details of what they're attempting. It's also a vector for a DDOS attack.
Is there some mechanism for doing this aside from obfuscation?
Do the User Agents sign their reports?
Any advice would be much appreciated!
I took a quick glance through the standard draft for the Report-To header, but it doesn't seem to touch on it.
One thought on application-level mitigation: record the IPs of all clients that are connected and authenticated and only accept reports from IPs that are whitelisted in this way. This assumes that the browser sends its reports direct from the client machine (I believe this is the case, but can anyone confirm?).
Related
I am looking for a solution to stop multiple sign ups on an upcoming websites of mine, but I am looking for different alternatives besides IP saving and tracing that.
So I was thinking about computer ID saving on the server. Is that possible?
No, that's not possible simply because this information is never sent on the network. The only information you could reliably get from a user visiting your website is his IP address in addition to the standard HTTP headers which might or not contain information about the UserAgent he is using, the language he configured in his browser, ...
I am building application that needs to interact with users without accounts and keep track of them. I know OpenID is great and easy and I've used it in almost all my apps, but accounts are not option even those that user is likely to have like Facebook, Google, Yahoo account, etc.
Any coding language is acceptable (but asp.net, JavaScript or Flash would be best, or a combination).
So my plan is to use cookies...but cookies are so easily removed (I really don't count it as reliable identifier)
IP address...well this is efficient even trough proxies, but if someone uses dynamic IP like my whole country this also becomes unreliable
Flash cookies are fine, but I recently read an article describing Mozilla Firefox History-cleaning system gets rid of them too, I need confirmation for this.
Browser Fingerprinting - I don't know how reliable it is since anyone that knows little of any language that can send HTTP requests can spoof it (client string at least).
If anyone knows of any other methods from the ones I listed, or want to correct me in my list feel free to reply.
What i'm wondering is, what kind of behaviour does google analytics show when a ddos attack occurs? Any theories?
My theory would be that an effective DDoS platform/script would not include anything as heavyweight as a JavaScript engine, and that therefore the DDoS activity would not show up in Google Analytics at all.
The point of a DDoS attack is to overwhelm the server with a flood of requests. Any CPU cycles that are spent evaluating JavaScript in the response that the server sends back are cycles that could better be used churning out more requests to the server. I would fully expect a properly executed DDoS attack to not waste time parsing the response from the server, or even reading it off of the underlying socket, let alone interpreting and executing and JavaScript that may be embedded in the markup or fetching scripts and other resources from domains other than the target server.
Of course, this does not preclude the possibility of an exceptionally naive DDoS attack implemented using web frameworks and libraries that do evaluate embedded JavaScript. Such an attack would not (or rather, should not if you've implemented your server code correctly) be very effective, but it would likely generate a spike in Google Analytics traffic.
It depends on the way that the DDOS is implemented. If it's simply an executable distributed to multiple machines, making simple HTTP queries using native TCP sockets, then Google Analytics wouldn't notice anything at all: because the JavaScript that gets returned would never be executed.
However, other sorts of DDOS attacks could leverage actual browsers distributed across many machines. For instance, if you could hack the Yahoo home page and insert an <iframe src='takemedown.com'> into it, you could easily DDOS "takemedown.com". In this particular scenario, GA would certainly detect the impressions, and because (depending on the scenario) there might be an HTTP referrer tag, you could possibly run a report in GA that could pull out the suspicious impressions.
But there are other similar scenarios that wouldn't leave any particular footprints. For instance, if you could hack Lady Gaga's twitter account, you could send out a link to her 16MM followers, and a significant number would immediately click on it: and since most of those clicking on it would probably be doing so from within a separate app, there wouldn't be any referrer tag, and no particular way of identifying the requests.
In other words, it all depends, but it's probably not a terribly useful avenue to investigate. In many (most?) scenarios, GA wouldn't even recognize the impression; and in many others, wouldn't have any reasonable way of picking out the good impressions from the bad.
It will show up 100% some significant peaks in google analytics , simply because there are huge number of requests from multiple sources having huge bounce rate !
When a HTTP DDoS attack occurs the attacker is either using several (thousands) of computers to do so. Sometimes, it's also done with servers. When they make the request, they don't render the javascript or anything - they simply in most cases just make a GET request to the webpage.
So no, it shouldn't really have an impact on GoogleAnalytics
Well, I'm also searching this kind of information, but I have some considerations about the answer:
You will probably not see the attack itself with Google analytics, but you should see the results, I mean, a DDoS is a "distributed deny of service", so, if the service is effectively denied, then you should see a flat line on the graph on Google analytics.
It depends how the bot works, but here's what happened to my website:
Google Analytics real time report for the monk
As well as the increase in traffic you will likely see your bounce rate go sky high and average time on page significantly drop - which I'm sure can have a negative impact on SERPS.
For me it coincided with a Google update so first I put it down to that, but I started getting a lot of traffic to the root page, terms, and privacy, with many prefixed with /?m=0 which is in itself odd (and I'd love for someone to shed light).
The attack caused a great deal of timeouts and was painful to fix:
In short, I hooked up CloudFlare, then created Security -> WAF rules to challenge countries where I was receiving most of the bot traffic. I also switched on the basic bot attack mode (there's a more effective super bot attack mode with the paid subscriptions).
The other interesting point of note was why was my site subject to a DDOS attack. I wish I knew, but at a similar time to when the attack started I was approached by someone who enquired about buying the website. Possibly a tactic to get me to sell it/sell it cheap.
I build ASP.NET websites (hosted under IIS 6 usually, often with SQL Server backends and forms authentication).
Clients sometimes ask if I can check whether there are people currently browsing (and/or whether there are users currently logged in to) their website at a given moment, usually so the can safely do a deployment (they want a hotfix, for example).
I know the web is basically stateless so I can't be sure whether someone has closed the browser window, but I imagine there'd be some count of not-yet-timed-out sessions or something, and surely logged-in-users...
Is there a standard and/or easy way to check this?
Jakob's answer is correct but does rely on installing and configuring the Membership features.
A crude but simple way of tracking users online would be to store a counter in the Application object. This counter could be incremented/decremented upon their sessions starting and ending. There's an example of this on the MSDN website:
Session-State Events (MSDN Library)
Because the default Session Timeout is 20 minutes the accuracy of this method isn't guaranteed (but then that applies to any web application due to the stateless and disconnected nature of HTTP).
I know this is a pretty old question, but I figured I'd chime in. Why not use Google Analytics and view their real time dashboard? It will require minor code modifications (i.e. a single script import) and will do everything you're looking for...
You may be looking for the Membership.GetNumberOfUsersOnline method, although I'm not sure how reliable it is.
Sessions, suggested by other users, are a basic way of doing things, but are not too reliable. They can also work well in some circumstances, but not in others.
For example, if users are downloading large files or watching videos or listening to the podcasts, they may stay on the same page for hours (unless the requests to the binary data are tracked by ASP.NET too), but are still using your website.
Thus, my suggestion is to use the server logs to detect if the website is currently used by many people. It gives you the ability to:
See what sort of requests are done. It's quite easy to detect humans and crawlers, and with some experience, it's also possible to see if the human is currently doing something critical (such as writing a comment on a website, editing a document, or typing her credit card number and ordering something) or not (such as browsing).
See who is doing those requests. For example, if Google is crawling your website, it is a very bad idea to go offline, unless the search rating doesn't matter for you. On the other hand, if a bot is trying for two hours to crack your website by doing requests to different pages, you can go offline for sure.
Note: if a website has some critical areas (for example, writing this long answer, I would be angry if Stack Overflow goes offline in a few seconds just before I submit my answer), you can also send regular AJAX requests to the server while the user stays on the page. Of course, you must be careful when implementing such feature, and take in account that it will increase the bandwidth used, and will not work if the user has JavaScript disabled).
You can run command netstat and see how many active connection exist to your website ports.
Default port for http is *:80.
Default port for https is *:443.
I have read a few other posts on here about mass emailing, but I need some other information. We want to integrate our mass e-mail system into our current application, but I fear this may not be a good idea. Does anyone have any input as to what kind of resources are needed to send, potentially, 1000's of emails an hour? We only have one web server right now and do not have access to our mail server. We do have full access to our web server, however. Would it be a bad idea to host the mass e-mail application on our current server? Should we have a separate sever to run this type of application and call the server via web services (WCF)? Each email would need to be sent separately because the links on the e-mail are for tracking and unsubscribing purposes. I appreciate your thoughts.
Daniel
Yes its a bad idea,
One of the key things for detecting spam, is the IP address it came from (Known as its reputation) if you start sending out alot of emails which end up getting marked as spam (Which is likly, even if the users said they wated to recieve email) your IP address could end up in trouble. I wouldnt fancy doing this on my webserver.
As for specs, your bandwidth is going to be hit hard when you start doing somthing like this. Although I think you would be suprised at how fast you can send out emails (Mail Server Dependant)
Either way when it comes to sending mass mail campaigns out, I'd speak to a third party if its somthing you are serious about, they have the knowledge and hardware to perform campaigns that are not going to damage your IP rep.
I think this issue all depends on your mail server. I've been in a project where we sent out 50-100K emails in a few hours and the main limitation was the capacity of the mail server. In my opinion it would be fine to have the mail client run on the web server as it won't be using too much resources if well written, the main question is what the mail server can take.
You can help your reputation on some email providers by contacting them and or filling out bulk mail registrations.
This is for yahoo:
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/postmaster/bulkv2.html
I would not recommend using exchange for anything like this. You will want a separate bulk mail server like Ironport.
http://www.ironport.com/
Otherwise your internal emails will get stuck in the queue with all of your bulk emails which you definitely don't want.
The actual code involved does not have to be that complex. In my case we used an asynchronous task to loop over an email list table in the DB pulling out a batch of 20 or so at a time sending then sleeping for a number of seconds. Email providers do not like receiving hundreds/thousands of emails from a source at one time. Even better if you can stagger the list by providers.