full-disclosure - Re: strange domain name in phishing email

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Date: Wed Mar 15 14:53:47 2006
From: michael.holstein at csuohio.edu (Michael Holstein)
Subject: Re: strange domain name in phishing email

>   The reason that most webservers will reject it if the Host: header has a 
> numeric IP address is that the webserver already knows the IP address; the 
> only point of a host header is so it knows which of multiple dns names was 
> resolved to that IP address and hence which of the multiple vhosts it should 
> route the request to.  If the Host: header contains only a numeric IP, not a 
> dns FQDN, it isn't any use in allowing the server to discriminate between 
> vhosts.

Actually, configuring websites to ONLY accept requests which contain a 
host header for the domain in question is an excellent way to block a 
lot of "bot" or otherwise automatically generated queries. Having our 
IIS servers setup to do this back in '01 blocked a lot of the various 
worm defacements.

IIRC, setting IIS up this way was reecommended by Microsoft at one point 
as a security precatution.

~Mike.