PING attack – How bad is it?

PING-based Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are infamous as they are known to have brought down high profile web sites such as Ebay, ETrade and Yahoo. They have also been used in an attempt to bring down the entire Internet by attacking its DNS root servers. In this paper, we investigate the impact of PING-flooding on computer systems. We create real PING-attack traffic in a controlled lab environment at UTPA to understand the intensity of the attack and its impact on processing power of a Windows-XP computer deploying Pentium-4, 2.66 GHz processor. In this experiment, we set out to measure the rate of resource exhaustion of the computer as its bandwidth is increasingly consumed by the PING-attack traffic. It is observed that PING attack causes resource starvation for the computer when the PING-attack traffic increasingly consumes the bandwidth of a Fast Ethernet Link.