Here are the gory details from the first MOTD last Saturday: The attacker is forging random source addresses on his packets, so there is no way to find his/her location. There is also no way to screen out those packets with a simple router filter. This is probably the most deadly type of denial-of-service attack possible. There is no easy or quick way of dealing with it. If it continues into Saturday we will start working on kernel modifications to try to absorb the damage (since there's absolutely no way to avoid it). This however will not be an easy job and it could take days to get done (and get done right). For those who are IP hackers, the problem is that we're being flooded with SYNs from random IP addresses on our smtp ports. We are getting on average 150 packets per second (50 per host). We are not the only site being attacked in this way. I know of one other site that is being attacked in an identical manner right now, and I know of three others that have been attacked in the last two weeks. I hope that this means that the attacker is merely playing malicious games, and will soon tire of molesting our site. If that is the case, mail will come back up as soon as the attack ends. But if the attacker is really interested in damaging Panix specifically, the attack may *never* stop and service won't be restored until we can write kernel modifications. Since then the packet streams have hit almost all the ports for news, www, telnet, etc. DCF