A compromised router is reconfigured by an attacker to redirect SMTP email traffic to the...

In a case study of a redirect tunnel set up on a router, some anomalies were noticed while watching network traffic with the TCPdump packet sniffer.

Packets going to port 25 (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol [SMTP] used by mail servers and other Mail Transfer Agents [MTAs] to send and receive e-mail) were apparently taking a different network path. The TLs were consistently three less than other destination ports, indicating another three network hops were taken.

Other IP header values listed, such as fragment offset. The acknowledgement number is a TCP, not IP, header field.