Today in my CIS4361 Secure Operating Systems class I was drifting off as the professor was doing a quick review of filesystem attacks when I heard the strangest phrase since the BouncyCastle provider for JCE: Smurfing. Apparently this smurfing, as it were, is when an ICMP echo packet is spoofed from the target’s IP address to a router, called the smurf amplifier, which then sends the request to all of the nodes attached to it who then send ICMP echo reply packets to the target. Essentially, this inundates the router and target with echo reply packets and should lead to all out network outages. Pretty neat, and with a name like smurfing, it has to be good.
Resources:
