fork bomb attack

[Kyrre Ness Sjobak]

lør, 19.03.2005 kl. 15.13 skrev Thomas Hille:
> Am Samstag, den 19.03.2005, 12:37 +0000 schrieb Rui Miguel Seabra:
> > On Fri, 2005-03-18 at 21:23 -0700, Tyler Larson wrote:
> > > Fork bombs have always been of little concern to admins. They do 
> > > relatively little damage and are completely traceable. The perpetrator 
> > > does little more than land himself in a lot of hot water. In most cases, 
> > > the threat of disciplinary action is enough protection--it's not an 
> > > attack that can be launched anonymously.
> > 
> > They are definitely not of little concern. A fork bomb on the DNS server
> > launched through some other bug would cause some interesting harm.
> 
> Sorry, but an admin that allows user to log into a dns server is either
> stupid or ignorant. And when somebody would be able to log into it via a
> bug, you should first fix that bug since there are other more efficient
> ways to "get rid" of the dns server. (like overloading the network
> interface with traffic)

I don't think he talked about "log into" - i think he meant "broke into
through a hole in the dns-server". That there then migth be worse thing
to do than forkbomb it, is another matter...

But bugs in (preinstalled) system software has also been known to cause
a resource exhaustion. I had cups do this to me once (try sending a 400
mb postscript to gimpprint on a 128 MB RAM computer), or print to a
remote machine called "localhost" - thats effectively a forkbomb...