ZyWALL 10 Internet Security Gateway

ICMP Echo

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.

ICMP Vulnerability

ICMP is an error-reporting protocol that works in concert with IP. The following ICMP types trigger an alert:

Table 14-1 ICMP Commands That Trigger Alerts

5 REDIRECT

13TIMESTAMP_REQUEST

14TIMESTAMP_REPLY

17ADDRESS_MASK_REQUEST

18ADDRESS_MASK_REPLY

Illegal Commands (NetBIOS and SMTP)

The only legal NetBIOS commands are the following - all others are illegal.

Table 14-2 Legal NetBIOS Commands

MESSAGE:

REQUEST:

POSITIVE:

NEGATIVE:

RETARGET:

KEEPALIVE:

All SMTP commands are illegal except for those displayed in the following tables.

Table 14-3 Legal SMTP Commands

AUTH

DATA

EHLO

ETRN

EXPN

HELO

HELP

MAIL

NOOP

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

QUIT

RCPT

RSET

SAML

SEND

SOML

TURN

VRFY

BDAT

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Introducing the ZyWALL Firewall

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