Odd Addresses

[Eric Murray]

On Sun, Feb 11, 2001 at 12:44:40PM -0500, John Young wrote:
> 
> We have from time to time phantom "accesses" from odd 
> addresses such as yesterday:
> 
>    http://161/1.035 

an http:whatever is probably from the Referrer line.  It's not
meaningful as a name of the machine that's accessing a page.
That would be a machine name or IP address.


Here's a line from an actual log file:
213-99-180-52.uc.nombres.ttd.es - - [11/Feb/2001:18:07:28 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 2146 "http://buscador.ya.com/scripts/busqueda?item=laura&cat=internet&offset=40&palabras=all" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows 98; DigExt)"


The first field 213-99-180-52.uc.nombres.ttd.es
is the address of the machine that sent the request.

The first field in quotes, starting with GET, is the HTTP request that
213-99-180-52.uc.nombres.ttd.es sent.  The next two fields (200 2146)
is the code that the web server returned, and the size of the data returned.
The next part in quotes (http://buscador.ya.com....) is the Referrer field,
which is what 213-99-180-52.uc.nombres.ttd.es sent as the last site
that they'd visited, i.e. the one that linked to us.

There's nothing that says that the Referrer tag has to be correct, or even
present. (well, the HTTP spec probably says that it should be correct, but
there's no way to enforce that).

> These accesses and addresses do not show up in the log 
> files but are listed in summaries of accesses produced by 
> Analog on our dedicated server. When we run Analog of
> what should be the same log file on our machine the 
> addresses do not appear.

There's probably a bug in the copy of Analog that your ISP is using.
A look at the log file would tell.
Another cause could be someone sending ASCII control characters in
HTTP fields, which confuse Analog but which are translated into something
else when you retreive the log files.  

> The odd addresses change, none repeat, and
> do not appear every day.
> 
> Got any ideas what such entries indicate? Machine 
> camouflage, snoops by spooks, spoofs, debris,
> taunts?

Most likely software bugs.

-- 
  Eric Murray           Consulting Security Architect         SecureDesign LLC
  http://www.securedesignllc.com                            PGP keyid:E03F65E5