ICMP Flood DoS Attack Explained

August 6, 2024

What is an ICMP Flood DoS Attack?

ICMP stands for Internet Control Message Protocol and serves as a means to troubleshoot network issues, network diagnostics, and so forth. When one computer sends an ICMP echo-request to another computer, the receiving computer responds with an ICMP echo-reply. A common way to send an ICMP request is via the Ping command in Unix like operating systems. An attacker can utilize ICMP to flood another computer with echo-requests causing the receiving computer to crash. This is an ICMP Flood DoS Attack. When an attacker utilizes multiple machines to leverage the attack it is an ICMP Flood DDoS Attack.

Prevention

Prevention of an ICMP DoS attack can be accomplished via limiting the number of ICMP / Ping requests an IP may send before being blocked, however this method of protection may be easily defeated in a DDoS attack as the number of attacking IP’s increases.

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