3.2. Ping Flood Attack
Ping is a type of ICMP message that is used to know the reachability of a host. Based on RFC 0792 [11], ICMP Echo request must be replied with an ICMP Echo Reply message. Attackers take advantage of this protocol and try to flood the end host with Ping Requests and the host ultimately replies to those requests and hence consumes the computer resources. With a flood of such requests, resource starvation usually happens on the host computer. The attacker, generally, spoofs the source IP and sends a barrage of Ping requests to the victim computer. The victim computer incurs Denial of Service while being consumed in replying to all the requests it receives. This Ping Flood Attack is a Layer-3 attack in the TCP/IP suite. One of the earlier work shows that a simple Ping attack can make the target host busy in processing the ping re-quests consuming 100% of the CPU utilization [12].