ZyXEL Communications G-2000 Plus User Manual

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ZyAIR G-2000 Plus User’s Guide
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Chapter 14 Firewalls
Figure 76   SYN Flood
In a LAND Attack, hackers flood SYN packets into the network with 
a spoofed source IP address of the targeted system. This makes it 
appear as if the host computer sent the packets to itself, making the 
system unavailable while the target system tries to respond to itself. 
• A brute-force attack, such as a "Smurf" attack, targets a feature in the IP specification 
known as directed or subnet broadcasting, to quickly flood the target network with 
useless data. A Smurf hacker floods a router with Internet Control Message Protocol 
(ICMP) echo request packets (pings). Since the destination IP address of each packet is 
the broadcast address of the network, the router will broadcast the ICMP echo request 
packet to all hosts on the network. If there are numerous hosts, this will create a large 
amount of ICMP echo request and response traffic. If a hacker chooses to spoof the 
source IP address of the ICMP echo request packet, the resulting ICMP traffic will not 
only clog up the "intermediary" network, but will also congest the network of the spoofed 
source IP address, known as the "victim" network. This flood of broadcast traffic 
consumes all available bandwidth, making communications impossible.