Hi,
As you may be aware, massive distributed denial of service attacks
have been mounted over the last couple of weeks by sending forged
administrative queries to public NTP servers.
A favourite query in use is "monlist", which results in a constant
stream of data being returned from the NTP server to the victim
host.
While we have no evidence that any BitFolk VPS has so far been used
in such an attack, we are going to take some pre-emptive action to
minimise the risk.
As there is no need to allow these administrative queries from the
entire Internet, we now require these to be disabled by default and
only allowed from specified trusted hosts. This has always been the
configuration provided to you on provisioning of your VPS, so only
those who have changed their ntpd configuration would have
re-enabled administrative queries.
Disabling administrative queries is normally achieved by using the
"noquery" option in the "restrict" lines. This setting does not
disallow time synchronisation.
For more information please see:
https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Securing_NTP
Cheers,
Andy
--
http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting