Homeless Vikings

Architecture and Background

Dave Josephsen: Homeless Vikings, (short-lived bgp prefix hijacking and the spamwars) BGP Prefix hijacks take the IP addresses of others and make them your own. This talk provides a chilling account of the current use of prefix hijacks by spammers in a successful effort to defeat RBL's.

Vulnerability Analysis

Placed within the context of the history of the spamwar, this talk makes clear the grim future we face if we continue to escalate the spam war into the network layer; namely a future where every spammer on earth can arbitrarily choose and make routable an unallocated ipv4 address (one that the RBL's have never seen) once per day for the next 150 years or so without ever using the same address twice, and never colliding with any other spammer. Author of the Prentice Hall book: "Building a Monitoring Infrastructure with Nagios", Dave Josephsen is the Senior Systems Engineer for DBG, Inc., where he maintains a collection of geographically dispersed server farms.

Exploitation and Demonstrations

He has a decade of hands-on experience with Unix systems, routers, firewalls, and load balancers in support of complex, high-volume networks. He has nearly two decades of experience putting paper in printers, and over THREE decades of experience breathing.

Remediation and Defensive Strategies

His co-authored work on Bayesian spam filtering earned a Best Paper award at USENIX LISA 2004. He has been published in both ;login and Sysadmin magazines on topics relating to security, systems monitoring and spam mitigation.