Smurfing

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Revision as of 22:21, 11 April 2008 by Shahinrs (Talk)
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Smurfing or a Smurf Attack is a way of generating a lot of computer network traffic to a victim site. That is, it is a type of denial-of-service attack. Specifically, it floods a target system via spoofed broadcast ping messages.

In such an attack, a perpetrator sends a large amount of ICMP echo (ping) traffic to IP broadcast addresses, all of it having a spoofed source address of the intended victim. If the routing device delivering traffic to those broadcast addresses delivers the IP broadcast to all hosts (for example via a layer 2 broadcast), most hosts on that IP network will take the ICMP echo request and reply to it with an echo reply, multiplying the traffic by the number of hosts responding. On a multi-access broadcast network, hundreds of machines might reply to each packet.



Contents

What is Smurfing?

How does a Smurf Attack take place?

Prevention

References


Shahinrs

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