Smurf attack

A Smurf attack is a distributed denial-of-service attack in which large numbers of Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) packets with the intended victim's spoofed source IP are broadcast to a computer network using an IP broadcast address. Most devices on a network will, by default, respond to this by sending a reply to the source IP address. If the number of machines on the network that receive and respond to these packets is very large, the victim's computer will be flooded with traffic. This can slow down the victim's computer to the point where it becomes impossible to work on. The original Smurf was written by Dan Moschuk (alias TFreak) in 1997. In the late 1990s, many IP networks would participate in Smurf attacks if prompted (that is, they would respond to ICMP requests sent to broadcast addresses). The name comes from the idea of very small, but numerous attackers overwhelming a much larger opponent (see Smurfs). Today, administrators can make a network immune to such abuse; therefore, very few networks remain vulnerable to Smurf attacks. A Smurf amplifier is a computer network that lends itself to being used in a Smurf attack. Smurf amplifiers act to worsen the severity of a Smurf attack because they are configured in such a way that they generate a large number of ICMP replies to the victim at the spoofed source IP address. Attack Amplification Factor (AAF) is a term coined by Dr. Sanjeev Kumar, professor at the University of Texas at Austin in his published paper to represent the degree of bandwidth enhancement or amplification that an original attack traffic undergoes (with the help of Smurf amplifiers) during its transmission towards the victim computer. Under the assumption no countermeasures are taken to dampen the effect of a Smurf attack, this is what happens in the target network with n active hosts (that will respond to ICMP echo requests). The ICMP echo request packets have a spoofed source address (the Smurfs' target) and a destination address (the patsy; the apparent source of the attack).