fork bomb attack

[Rui Miguel Seabra]

On Fri, 2005-03-18 at 21:23 -0700, Tyler Larson wrote:
> Fork bombs have always been of little concern to admins. They do 
> relatively little damage and are completely traceable. The perpetrator 
> does little more than land himself in a lot of hot water. In most cases, 
> the threat of disciplinary action is enough protection--it's not an 
> attack that can be launched anonymously.

They are definitely not of little concern. A fork bomb on the DNS server
launched through some other bug would cause some interesting harm.

> In the extremely rare case where fork bomb protection is a big enough 
> concern to warrant reducing the process limits, the administrator can 
> impose whatever ulimit he wants. However, this is the exception rather 
> than the rule.

Yes. But I don't envisage an user of fedora with 16k processes, do you?

I agree that the limit is insanely high.

Rui

-- 
+ No matter how much you do, you never do enough -- unknown
+ Whatever you do will be insignificant,
| but it is very important that you do it -- Gandhi
+ So let's do it...?

Please AVOID sending me WORD, EXCEL or POWERPOINT attachments.
See http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html
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