How To Prevent A ICMP Flood Attack
Ping attacks are a form of DDoS attack that attempts to flood a system with requests in an attempt to disable it.
You can prevent ping attacks by configuring your firewall, adding filters to your router, looking at spoofed packets, monitoring traffic patterns, scanning your network.
What Are Ping Attacks?
A ping attack is an attack designed to overwhelm or flood a targeted device with ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol) pings. In normal situations, a ping is used to check connectivity between a source and a destination devices by way of ICMP echo-requests and echo-reply messages.
A Ping Attack on the other hand purposely floods the target device with requests packets.
The destination device is forced to respond with an equal number of reply packets and eventually cannot keep up with the volume of requests. This causes the target to become inaccessible to normal traffic and unresponsive to normal ping requests.
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How Can You Prevent Ping Attacks?
You can prevent Ping Attacks by:
- Configuring your firewall to block ICMP pings from entering your network at the perimeter.
- Adding filters to tell your router to detect and drop malformed data packets or those coming from suspicious sources.
- Looking for spoofed packets that do not originate from within your network, also known as egress filtering.
- Installing network monitoring software to alert for traffic patterns that are not ordinary.
- Scanning your network for open ports on a regular basis that is outside of your baseline.
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