Ping Attack

[396_WAYS_TO_SPIT]

What the h**l is a ping attack?My firewall keeps catching these things. Could someone school me up on these? Do I need to worry about it? Do I need something to block them besides the firewall?
396

[powerplay230]

Everyone knows I'm lost.. but since I installed a good firewall 3 months ago I have had 3772 outside ping attacks this month and that is a decreasing number.

[Phat Matt]

I would think a real ping attack would be thousands of attacks within seconds. Like trying to overwhelm the server. I could be wrong though.

[coolchange]

You can ping anyone. even yourself. From the dos prompt just type ping then the address and if its open you will get "reply". They're looking for open systems.

[Some Kind Of Monster]

I could write you a description in my words, but I am lazy right now so I will use a quick paste on a description I found -
"The ping of death is a form of a "ping attack" On the Internet, ping of death is a denial of service (DoS) attack caused by an attacker deliberately sending an IP packet larger than the 65,536 bytes allowed by the IP protocol. One of the features of TCP/IP is fragmentation; it allows a single IP packet to be broken down into smaller segments. In 1996, attackers began to take advantage of that feature when they found that a packet broken down into fragments could add up to more than the allowed 65,536 bytes. Many operating systems didn't know what to do when they received an oversized packet, so they froze, crashed, or rebooted.
Ping of death attacks were particularly nasty because the identity of the attacker sending the oversized packet could be easily spoofed and because the attacker didn't need to know anything about the machine they were attacking except for its IP address. By the end of 1997, operating system vendors had made patches available to avoid the ping of death. Still, many Web sites continue to block Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) ping messages at their firewalls to prevent any future variations of this kind of denial of service attack.
Ping of death is also known as "long ICMP". Variations of the attack include jolt, sPING, ICMP bug, and IceNewk."
Rolandg on Devshed.com

[mickeyfinn]

more than likely the pings you are picking up are just returns from different sites you have visited. You didn't say if you were on Hi speed or dial up. Dial up is almost immune from DOS as your IP address generally changes everytime you log on. If someone is randomly pinging IP addresses and your firewall is not in "stealth" mode (not returning pings) then you might draw someones attention and cause them to investigate a little further to see what security is there and try to get in to see what you have. Also a lot of the virus' (worms) going around right now are sending the IP address back to someone setting them up for a back door attack into their PC. Home users don't usually have a lot to worry about if they don't do internet banking or buying using credit cards. Even credit card information is extremely hard to pick up if you are just an occasional user and keep temp internet files and cookies cleaned up. You should also never turn on "auto complete" as this remembers numbers you enter into web sites and stores them on your computer for use later. This is the biggest way hackers steal that kind of information from a visitors machine.

[Keithb87]

I thought Ping was a brand of golf club... What the hell do I know???? :rollside:

[Wally_Gator]

Ping Attack...
A ping is a simple tool used for computers talking to each other.
One computer sends a "hello" to another computers address.
The receiving computer is then supposed to send "echo reply", the equivalent of I'm here.
Pings can be used by hackers to see if there is a computer at a given address. In your case, your firewall sounsd like it is filtering out the ping so there is never a response sent. Some firewall systems classify even a single ping as an attack. Hey if all I am doing is going out on the internet rather than hosting information on my computer, why does someone need to know it is there?
D.O.S. attacks or Denial Of Service attacks are meant to make your computer unuseable. A Ping D.O.S. attack floods a target computer with literally millions of ping requests. The target computer tries to respond to all of the requests and subsequently slows way down in the process. Some older computers and operating systems would crash.
There is ALOT more too this, but this should help to understand the basics.

[Scream]

Buy a cheap router, problem solved. The hardware will keep you safe and warm...lol
Scream