Network Analysis Using Wireshark 2 Cookbook - Second Edition

ICMP smurf attack

ICMP smurf attack is another distributed DoS attack where a malicious attacker will trigger a large number of ICMP echo messages to one or more destinations with the target (victim) host's spoofed address as the source IP address of the ICMP echo messages. This will result in the victim host receiving a large volume of echo reply messages, causing its buffer to overrun and deplete:

Single network topology

In the preceding diagram, the attacker generates an ICMP echo message with the spoofed address of PC1. This attack results in PC1 receiving an ICMP echo reply from unintended responders, causing buffer depletion issues. ...