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I found this video in which they talk about crashing a website with a Ping Of Death (PoD) attack, using cmd only. How to secure a website against this type of denial-of-service (DoS) attack?

I assume it's harder to protect against it since anyone can perform such an attack.

WhiteWinterWolf
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Mohammad
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    You forgot the link to the [YouTube video](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DB4eMFrQYiY&feature=youtube_gdata_player) (see [original question on SO](http://stackoverflow.com/q/15721399/53114)). However, I don’t see how a ping would result in a PHP warning caused by malformed regular expression used with `eregi`. – Gumbo Mar 30 '13 at 18:04
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    This has to do with the firewalls. Normally firewalls dont allow ICMP ping messages inside the system. Suppose they allow and see a lots of request originating from a particular sender, the ideal firewall should mark them and prevent further entry into system. – Ganapathy Ramachandran Mar 30 '13 at 18:22
  • @GanapathySubramanian - that doesn't answer the question that the OP asked. – Rory Alsop Mar 30 '13 at 20:17
  • @Rory Alsop Yes I do agree that we can't attack a server just by using ping from command prompt. We need a DDOS as pointed by Adnan. I was trying to answer this question "How to secure any website against this type of attak". So I was pointing that it should be mitigated by Firewall. – Ganapathy Ramachandran Mar 30 '13 at 21:12

1 Answers1

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Ping of Death attacks are things of the past. Operating systems no longer freak out when assembling large fragmented ICMP packets.

That video is trying to demonstrate a ping flooding attack, a DoS attack in which he's trying to send more ICMP packets than what the server can handle. Chances are that the server being "attacked" has bigger downlink that the attacker's uplink. Allow me to demonstrate.

The guy in the video is trying to do something like this:
weak_dos

As you can see, he'll never be able to flood the server's downlink/resources. For this attack to be successful you need something called a Distributed Denial of Service attack (DDoS), in which a large number of attackers try to flood the server's resources

ddos

To learn about mitigating DDoS attacks, you can start by checking this question about different techniques used by firewalls.

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Adi
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