Ping flood
Encyclopedia
A ping flood is a simple denial-of-service attack
where the attacker/s overwhelms the victim with ICMP Echo Request (ping)
packets. It is most successful if the attacker has more bandwidth
than the victim (for instance an attacker with a DSL line and the victim on a dial-up modem
). The attacker hopes that the victim will respond with ICMP Echo Reply packets, thus consuming both outgoing bandwidth as well as incoming bandwidth. If the target system is slow enough, it is possible to consume enough of its CPU cycles for a user to notice a significant slowdown.
Denial-of-service attack
A denial-of-service attack or distributed denial-of-service attack is an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users...
where the attacker/s overwhelms the victim with ICMP Echo Request (ping)
Ping
Ping is a computer network administration utility used to test the reachability of a host on an Internet Protocol network and to measure the round-trip time for messages sent from the originating host to a destination computer...
packets. It is most successful if the attacker has more bandwidth
Bandwidth (computing)
In computer networking and computer science, bandwidth, network bandwidth, data bandwidth, or digital bandwidth is a measure of available or consumed data communication resources expressed in bits/second or multiples of it .Note that in textbooks on wireless communications, modem data transmission,...
than the victim (for instance an attacker with a DSL line and the victim on a dial-up modem
Modem
A modem is a device that modulates an analog carrier signal to encode digital information, and also demodulates such a carrier signal to decode the transmitted information. The goal is to produce a signal that can be transmitted easily and decoded to reproduce the original digital data...
). The attacker hopes that the victim will respond with ICMP Echo Reply packets, thus consuming both outgoing bandwidth as well as incoming bandwidth. If the target system is slow enough, it is possible to consume enough of its CPU cycles for a user to notice a significant slowdown.