bot net get request attack mitigation?

That sounds like a viral DDoS with that many attack nodes. Are the IP's randomly scattered across the Internet or concentrated in only a few netblocks? A random distribution might point to a viral distribution of the attack program.

Other than a fast upstream filter there's not a lot you can do about this sort of attack and still keep the web server available for normal use. I don't see any new viruses that mention this sort of attack or and new security advisories about Apache, so this may be something completely new.

Yeah, lucky us.  We have seen similar attacks before, but never this powerful.  I made the mistake of not making a good authoritative master list of all the "bots", but am doing so now.  Based on what I've seen so far though, it's totally random and there are thousands of them.  

I'm definitely wondering if Apache could make a more "efficient" response to such a request.  Is there an apache hack that might recognize this request in some way and drop it immediately?  I've tried doing a "Files" match for it and then denying it but that didn't help either.

I'm also going to try the iptables "string" match option to see if that helps at all.

Any other suggestions would be immensely appreciated.

in iptables you can block such requests, but it's a performance bootleneck 'cause iptables needs to parse each http packet (needs to terminate the request)
in apache you can use mod_rewrite or mod_security to block the request, I'd suggest to simply drop them

Or you need a Web Application Shield. AFAIK, there are no free products now, think about starting with at least $10000,-
Some traditional network firewalls (iptables still mentioned) also have limited posibilities to block it.

Do you need more detailed informations?

I suspect that iptables would crumble, having to inspect each and every http packet.

What do you mean simply dropping them?  I have tried using a Deny from IP set of statements, but for some reason these long requests bypass them.  I'm not sure how or why.  I have also tried using mod_security, but can't seem to find the filter that does the trick.  What SecFilter regexp should catch the request above?  For some reason mod_security can't catch them either.  

I have also thought about hacking the apache source code such that it behaves differently when receiving a long filename but am not sure where to look or if this is the right thing to do.

Web application shield is not an option right now, unfortunately.

SecFilter "/AAA.*"

> What do you mean simply dropping them?
I mean drop the packets, not reject

For some reason, that Filter won't match the packets.  Does the request have to be valid for it to work?  Remember, the requests are have very large filenames that cause apache to throw errors very early on.

did you enable logging or debugging? It tells you what's going on, usually.

SecFilterDefaultAction "deny,log"
SecFilterDebugLog logs/modsec_debug_log
SecFilterDebugLevel 4

or:

SecAuditEngine On
SecAuditLog logs/audit_log

then  a filter:

SecFileter AAAA "deny,log,status:500"

and with the malicious request it should produce log messages

ahoffmann,

Here's a mod_security log of the attack:

HTTP/0.9 (null) ======================================== Request: 80.119.150.31 - - [Sat May 1 13:13:08 2004] "GET
/AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA$
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.html^M^M"
403 0 Handler: (null) Error: access to
/AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA$
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.html
failed ---------------------------------------- GET
/AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA$
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.html^M^M

I tried various regular expression combinations but nothing worked.  Could it be that mod_security cannot block it because the URL is too long?

Thanks.