DragonFly On-Line Manual Pages
abck(1) DragonFly General Commands Manual abck(1)
NAME
abck - Process intrusion attempts found in the system log.
SYNOPSIS
abck [-dehilmsv]
DESCRIPTION
'abck' is an interactive tool to examine intrusion attempts and decide
what, if anything, to do about them. It reads through
/var/log/messages looking for evidence of an intrusion attempt. Upon
finding such a record, 'abck' qualifies it against information supplied
by the user on the command line to determine if the record is to be
processed. As packaged, 'abck' handles several common types of
intrusion attempt records, but it can easily be expanded to handle
others.
'abck' determines whether the record contains the name or IP address of
the source of the attack. If it finds an IP address, it will attempt
to reverse the address into a name. If it cannot find a legitimate
reverse, it will try to find the authority responsible for that
address.
Each matching record is presented to the user. The user can do a
'whois ' lookup on the record, pick or edit the domain name that will
be notified about the attack attempt, permanently forget the record
without processing it, skip the record, or quit the program.
Once the user has selected the domain to be notified (i.e., they did
not skip or forget a given record), 'abck' formats and sends an email
to the 'abuse' and 'root' accounts at that domain, notifying them of
the intrusion attempt. This email is also sent to the 'root' user on
the machine that was invaded. The email contains all the relevant
information about the machine which was attacked and appends a copy of
the log record containing evidence of the attempt.
Very often, an intruder will try several different means of entry,
thereby generating multiple log events. This is common, for example,
if an attacker is running a port scanning program. As 'abck' runs , it
keeps track of the attackers for which the user sends a notification
email. (The user may not necessarily send an email for each and every
intrusion attempt.) If 'abck' sees this intruder's host name/address
again later in the log, it will automatically send the notification to
the same place as the user originally selected without any user
interaction.
'abck' keeps track of the records that the user has either processed
(by sending an email notification) or 'forgotten' (see below). These
records will not appear again in subsequent invocations of 'abck'
(except with the -s option; all matching records are displayed, even if
they've previously been processed). This information is kept in
$HOME/.abck_history.
You may also specify a list of IPs or hostnames which 'abck' is to
ignore by default. This is useful when you do not wish to process
"attacks" from friendly locations or you wish to ignore intrusion
attempts from particular hosts for some other reason. You can override
this default behavior using the -i and -l command line switches.
For details on how to specify what you want ignored, see the "FILES"
section below.
OPTIONS
-d # Only go back # days in the log.
-e string
Only process attack records which do not contain 'string'.
-h Display help information.
-i Do not ignore the IPs/Hostnames found specified in
~/.abck_ignored Mutually exclusive with -l option. Last one on
command line is obeyed.
-l List ignored records as they are encountered. List all ignored
IPs/Hostnames at the end of the program run. Mutually exclusive
with -i option. Last one on command line is obeyed.
-m string
Only process attack records if they contain 'string'.
-s Don't actually process the matching records, just display them.
-v Display detailed version information.
RECORD PROCESSING
Each time the record of an intrusion attempt is found which matches the
command line-selected constraints, it is presented to the user for
disposition. A typical prompt looks like this:
Log Record:
Matching log entry found in /var/log/messages
Who Gets Message For: <nag.fleabag.horseplay.edu>? [horseplay.edu]
Pressing 'Enter' accepts the default notification destination of
'horseplay.edu'. Email is thus sent to 'abuse@horseplay.edu',
'root@horseplay.edu', and 'root@local.machine...'. 'abck' then moves
on to the next log entry.
Notice that this is the only way to actually send a notification email.
The commands below allow the user to modify the notification domain,
but only when the user responds with a blank line, will email actually
be sent.
The user can also issue a number of commands at the prompt to do
further lookups on the attacker or modify the domain to be notified.
f
Forget this record entirely without processing it. This means
it will not show up again in subsequent runs of 'abck'.
l Move left one subdomain in the default destination.
q Quit the program. This causes an immediate exit. No history
information is written to disk, even if some records have been
processed and notification sent.
r Move right one subdomain in the default destination. 'abck' will
prevent the user from doing this beyond the point there are less
than two domains showing. (A user can enter a destination with
only one level of domain manually. This is useful for testing
because it allows 'localhost' to be entered as the point of
notification.)
s Skip this record for now. The next time 'abck' is run, this
record will be presented the user again for disposition.
w Run a 'whois' lookup on the address/name found in the original
log entry. This is helpful when reverse lookups fail and may
provide further information about the origin of the attack.
Any other string
Replace the current default domain to notify with this string.
HOW 'abck' DECIDES WHETHER A RECORD INDICATES ATTACK
As 'abck' scans the system log, it looks for two keywords: 'refused'
and 'unauthorized'. If it finds any of these keywords anywhere in a
given log record, it presents that record to the user for disposition.
You can trivially add other 'trigger words' to the list of things
'abck' looks for as signs of intrusion. Suppose you have an intrusion
detection program which writes log records like this:
Jul 27 00:27:35 eskimo inetd[56691]: Intruder saddle.horseplay.edu foiled
To get 'abck' to present records like this to the user for disposition,
you only need two things. First, you need a unique trigger word that
only appears in records of this type, say, 'foiled'. Then, you need to
know which field within that record contains either the host name or IP
address of the attacker. The first field is 0, so in this example, it
would be field 7.
To get 'abck' to recognize this type of record, merely add this
information to the AttackKeys data structure in the program. This is a
Python dictionary, so all entries are of the form:
"keyword" : Fieldnum,
FILES
~/.abck_history - History of all records user has either processed or
forgotten.
~/.abck_ignored - List of all IPs or Hostnames you want to ignore by
default. Must have only one entry per line with no whitespace or
comment characters. You may enter partial entries so that they match
multiple attacking hosts. The rule is that partial entries for IPs
should be truncated on the right and partial entries for Hostnames
should be truncated on the left. For example, 192.168.3 will ignore
everything from 192.168.3.0 - 192.168.3.255. Similarly, the entry:
myschool.edu will ignore any host in that domain regardless of the less
signficant subdomains.
OTHER
You must have a reasonably current copy of 'python' installed for
'abck' to operate. Also, the 'dig' and 'whois' programs must be on the
system in a directory somewhere in $PATH.
BUGS AND MISFEATURES
None known as of this release, but the code is getting kind of ugly
from constant hacking. Maintenance is starting to be painful.
COPYRIGHT AND LICENSING
abck is Copyright(c) 2001, 2002 TundraWare Inc. For terms of use, see
the abck-License.txt file in the program distribution. If you install
abck on a FreeBSD system using the 'ports' mechanism, you will also
find this file in /usr/local/share/doc/abck.
AUTHOR
Tim Daneliuk
tundra@tundraware.com
TundraWare abck(1)