DoS cracking quesiton.

Hello all,

My wireless network has recently been DOSed. With police intervention, we were able to fix the problem but I'm wondering if anyone would be able to enlighten me with the exact attack we endured:

First it started where no one outside of 2km of certain sectors could get Internet. We found that the issue was only on verticle polarity so we switched a great number of people to one of our other towers that happen to be on horizontal, writing things off as something new deployed on verticle. Then, on another PoP (the guy set moved his equipment to a new tower of ours) two of our sectors went down. After much playing around it just happened by chance we saw a house with a 24dBi antenna pointed at our tower at only 2km away. Before they "decided" to turn the equipment off, we made the following discoveries:

-> Netstumber could NOT find the two AP's that this 24dBi dish happened to be pointed inbetween. Not at 100m away, and definetly not 1km to 10km away.

-> Kismet could see that it was broadcasting a signal, that it was as strong as usual. This is interesting, since Kismet is passive, I came to the conclusion that the AP was NOT receiving any packets but was definetly sending things out. Kismet reported some traffic (~10 to 20 packets/second). Interestingly, if we turned WEP off, Kismet could see the ARP packets being broadcasted out. We concluded that the AP could transmit packets, but there was no room for it the receive them.

-> The associations list on the AP's were empty.

-> Things went back to normal immidiately following the shut down of the incriminating antenna.

Thanks in advance, Kevin Brown.

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Reply to
Kevin Brown
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Could be as simple as just a carrier overloading the receiver on your APs. Wouldn't take much, and you're lucky he wasn't very subtle (or very smart). Check your FCC license for your rights in reference to interference...

Reply to
William P.N. Smith

Because the Polarization made such a difference, the problem does not seem to be a DOS attack.. i.e. "deauth" attack.... but more so just vertical Polarization interference.. If you are running at 2.4 and you saw a 24dbi dish, it is not necessarily

802.11 that it is x-mitting with at 2.4 hence you will not detect such stuff on 802.11 tools.. well maybe you will as noise (poor SNR etc)... I suggest running a spectrum analyzer and do a sweep vertical and horizontal to see if you see any interference... even frequency hop interference... Then by aiming a tight beamwidth antenna, locate the source and contact the people where it is coming from... Often stuff like this is non-intentional...

Reply to
Fresnel Fadermargini

Do you know of any software that can use a standard 802.11 card as a spectrum analyser? After this, we have decided to install a wireless intrustion detection using a WRAP board, an omni and kismet. From my understanding, kismet will pick up any 802.11 style attacks (deauth, AusCERT AA.2004-02, etc.), but is there a way we can pick up interference of 2.4ghz noise with an 802.11 card?

Thanks > Because the Polarization made such a difference, the problem does not seem > to

Reply to
Kevin Brown

Kevin Brown hath wroth:

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$99. Sees, noise, cordless phones, microwave ovens, etc.

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

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