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If through a vulnerability assessment, a network security issue is detected for the vulnerability below, applying the appropriate security patches in a timely matter is very important. If you have detected that your system has already been compromised, following CERT's Network Security recovery document will assist with recommended steps for system recovery.

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Vulnerability Assessment Details

MDaemon DoS

Vulnerability Assessment Summary
Crashes the remote MTA

Detailed Explanation for this Vulnerability Assessment

It was possible to crash the remote SMTP server
by opening a great amount of sockets on it.

This problem permits a possible hacker to make your
SMTP server crash, thus preventing you
from sending or receiving e-mails, which
will affect your work.

*** Note that due to the nature of this vulnerability,
*** Nessus can not be 100% positive on the effectiveness of
*** this flaw. As a result, this report might be a false positive

Solution :
If your SMTP server is constrained to a maximum
number of processes, i.e. it's not running as
root and as a ulimit 'max user processes' of
256, you may consider upping the limit with 'ulimit -u'.

If your server has the ability to protect itself from
SYN floods, you should turn on that features, i.e. Linux's CONFIG_SYN_COOKIES

The best solution may be Cisco's 'TCP intercept' feature.

Network Security Threat Level: High

Networks Security ID: 8554

Vulnerability Assessment Copyright: This script is Copyright (C) 1999 Renaud Deraison

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