The Sword of SEO part II

Well, it’s been a long time since I posted the first article on this. My time or lack thereof got the best of me. To counter this attack is actually very very easy. The first thing you do is you find out who is the referrer. This is simply done by tailing the logs. If you have a single domain, this can be fairly easy. Otherwise my preferred method involves using “watch ls -l” and seeing which log grows the fastest. This tends to be the one getting hit, or a likely suspect. I will probably write a perl script later to check this and tell me which log grows the most in say 10 seconds eventually. After this, you can use tail in the manner of:

tail -f /etc/httpd/domlogs/domain.log

When you do this, you will see what IPs are querying the page and the source they are being referred from. Look for any thing that doesn’t look like a search engine. To actually block them after they are identified what you do is you block the attack based on a referrer in the .htaccess. See the convenient rewrite code I jacked off another web site (about the same I did when I really saw the attack.)

RewriteEngine on
# Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} attacker\.com [NC]
RewriteRule .* – [F]

So, why does this work you may ask? In the case of the scenario I saw the person was attacking a “high value” target. This means a page that hits the database and has dynamically generated content with no caching. Server side configuration CAN make these sort of attacks a lot harder to perpetrate as well. Anything that you can do to increase the robustness of a server will help with a DoS. When you add a rule like this where it denies access to the referrer basically what happens is you pull up static content instead. Static content uses virtually no resources compared to something PHP based and backed by a databse. It’s a good idea to know about this sort of attack, as I could see it being bigger in the future. Black hat SEO is very common these days, and if you have the SEO part down the resources to do the rest of this attack are virtually nothing compared to what it does. You can click here to go on Freshlinks and learn more about SEO and outreach strategies.  It could also be plausible we will see this attack combined with “conventional, network level” type DoSing to increase its effectiveness.

Another basic shell script

The great thing about shell scripts is that they are a great way to solve complex problems that can cost you a lot of time to do manually. To this end, I had a client that needed some videos (that was made by using the Video production services Toronto) encoded on his server that didn’t encode properly. For an experienced script writer this would take about 5 minutes to write. It also makes it so that if the client wants to use it they can. The configuration was nice because the input and output file name was the same, just the extension was different. This is not very polished, if it were I would

A)run it as the same user

B)Put it in the user’s homedir

C)Make it so that it was password protected and executable via PHP script so the user wouldn’t require any bash experience at all but could upload a list via FTP and just run it.

#!/bin/bash

for video in `cat /root/list.txt` #We will run a loop where each line in list.txt is run as a variable $video.
do
mv /home/user/public_html/media/videos/flv/$video.flv /home/user/public_html/media/videos/flv/$video.flv.old #back up old files
ffmpeg -y -b 1500 -r 25 -i  /home/gogreenc/public_html/media/videos/vid/$video.* -f flv -s 640×480 -deinterlace -ac 1 -ar 41400 /home/user/public_html/media/videos/flv/$video.flv #encode new file, 640X480 out, FLV format deinterlaced.
chown user:user /home/user/public_html/media/videos/flv/$video.flv #chown to the right user. Not required if running as the right user.
done

A quickie MySQL backup script

I’ve seen my fair share of clients that need basic MySQL backups but have no control panel or don’t want to bother with Control panel based backups. This is a really simple setup that lets you do DB backups and put them in a local directory of the server. It would likely be easily modified to rsync to another server as well if you wanted to. There are a ton of options that could be added to this, your imagination (and shell scripting capacity) are the only limitations. Some suggestions I have would be

-Mail on success or failure and on old file deletion

-Connect to a remote DB

-Monitor the overall size

Well enough with the abstract, on to the shell!

#!/bin/bash
date=`date +%Y%m%d`
mysqldump –all-databases > /mysqlbackups/mysql-$date.sql
find /mysqlbackups/ -atime +30 -delete

If you notice, this takes up all of 4 lines. The first one is the she-bang, the second is establishing the date time stamp, the third dumps the databases and the last one purges any old backups. The only real variable you have to change here is the “+30” so that it is the number of days you want to retain the backups for minus one.