Which of the following is not an example of a denial-of-service attack?
- Fraggle
- Smurf
- Teardrop
- Roadrunner
EXPLANATION
Smurf / Smurfing
When conducting a smurf attack, attackers will use spoof their IP address to be the same as the victim’s IP address. This will cause great confusion on the victim’s network, and a massive flood of traffic will be sent to the victim’s networking device, if done correctly.Most firewalls protect against smurf attacks, but if you do notice one, there are several things you can do. If you have access to the router your network or website is on, simply tell it to not forward packets to broadcast addresses. In a Cisco router, simply use the command: no ip directed-broadcast.
This won’t necessarily nullify the smurf attack, but it will greatly reduce the impact and also prevent your network or website from attacking others by passing on the attack. Optionally, you could upgrade your router to newer Cisco routers, which automatically filter out the spoofed IP addresses that smurf attacks rely on.
Fraggle
A Fraggle attack is exactly the same as a smurf attack, except that it uses the user datagram protocol, or UDP, rather than the more common transmission control protocol, or TCP. Fraggle attacks, like smurf attacks, are starting to become outdated and are commonly stopped by most firewalls or routers.
If indeed you think you are being plagued by a fraggle attack, simply block the echo port, located at port 7. You may also wish to block port 19, which is another commonly used fraggle exploitable port. This attack is generally less powerful than the smurf attack, since the TCP protocol is much more widely used than the UDP protocol.
Teardrop
In the teardrop attack, packet fragments are sent in a jumbled and confused order. When the receiving device attempts to reassemble them, it obviously won’t know how to handle the request. Older versions of operating systems will simply just crash when this occurs.
Operating systems such as Windows NT, Windows 95, and even Linux versions prior to version 2.1.63 are vulnerable to the teardrop attack. As stated earlier, upgrading your network hardware and software is the best way to stay secure from these types of attacks.
Fraggle, Smurf, and Teardrop are all actual denial-of-service attacks. Roadrunner is not.
