ICMP Flood denial of service attack type

Ping (ICMP) flood is a type of denial of service attack to give you an idea of ​​what it consists of, we could compare it to a phone prank: the attacker calls and hangs up over and over again, collapsing the line and preventing the use of the service and responding to legitimate calls. Apart from ping flood, other well-known flood attacks such as HTTP flood, SYN flood and UDP flood are used, all with the same objective: to saturate the target system with arbitrary requests until it collapses.

An ICMP request requires the server to process and respond to it, thus using CPU resources. Attacks on the ICMP protocol, such as smurf attacks, ICMP floods, and ping floods, take advantage of this to flood the ICMP request server without waiting for a response. These attacks are intended to overwhelm the response capacity of the server, thus blocking valid requests.

The main objective of this type of attack called ping flood is:

▸The attacker sends echo request packets in bulk to the victim’s device.

▸The victim’s device responds with echo reply packets.

Every incoming echo request packet uses the victim’s bandwidth. As an echo reply type packet is also sent for each incoming packet, the data volume of outgoing network traffic is equally high. If the attacker has enough bandwidth, this causes all available network resources on the victim’s side to be used. In this way, legitimate network traffic is interrupted or completely lost, depending on whether the attack is carried out from a single computer or from a computer network, the ICMP flood attack ping will be a DoS or DDoS attack.

The best way to handle and control these attacks would be:

▸Configure the system to improve security

▸Use a cloud-based service to mitigate DDoS

▸And of course protect your system with special hardware

Check also:
DDoS attacks increased 350% after lockdown
DDoS or Denial of service attack

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