In smurf attack, a hacker is able to flood the ISP with so many ‘garbage; packets that all the ISP’s available bandwidth is used up and its customers can’t send or receive data by using email, browsing the web and any other internet service.
It is a method of denying service on an IP connection. While a smurf attack can be used to completely disable a connection, it can also be used far more surreptitiously to just reduce bandwidth.
The technology used in the attacks is ICMP; the Internet Controls Message Protocol. The protocol’s main function is to return error messages to the source host when datagrams encounter problems in transit.
There are three players in a smurf attack: the attacker, the relay agents and the target.
A perpetrator sends a large amount of ICMOP echo traffic to specific IP broadcast addresses. These packets are forwarded to the hardware broadcast address of the LAN by the router that connects the LAN to the rest of the world.
It is very easy for an attacker to direct many megabits of traffic per second at an unsuspecting web server.
What is the smurf attack?
