Smurf attack

The Smurf attack is a distributed denial-of-service attack in which large numbers of (ICMP) packets with the intended victim's spoofed source IP are broadcast to a computer network using an IP broadcast address. Most devices on a network will, by default, respond to this by sending a reply to the source IP address. If the number of machines on the network that receive and respond to these packets is very large, the victim's computer will be flooded with traffic. This can slow down the victim's computer to the point where it becomes impossible to work on.

In the late 1990s, many IP networks would participate in Smurf attacks if prompted (that is, they would respond to ICMP requests sent to broadcast addresses). Today, administrators can make a network immune to such abuse; therefore, very few networks remain vulnerable to Smurf attacks.

The fix is two-fold:

Another proposed solution is network ingress filtering, which rejects the attacking packets on the basis of the forged source address.

An example of configuring a router so it will not forward packets to broadcast addresses, for a Cisco router, is:

(This example does not protect a network from becoming the target of Smurf attack; it merely prevents the network from participating in a Smurf attack.)

A Smurf amplifier is a computer network that lends itself to being used in a Smurf attack. Smurf amplifiers act to worsen the severity of a Smurf attack because they are configured in such a way that they generate a large number of replies to the victim at the spoofed source IP address.

A fraggle attack is a variation of a Smurf attack where an attacker sends a large amount of traffic to ports 7 () and 19 () to an IP Broadcast Address, with the intended victim's spoofed source IP address. It works very similar to the Smurf attack in that many computers on the network will respond to this traffic by sending traffic back to the spoofed source IP of the victim, flooding it with traffic.

Fraggle.c, the source code of the attack, was also released by TFreak.

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