Standard attack pattern
Draft
CAPEC-487: ICMP Flood
An adversary may execute a flooding attack using the ICMP protocol with the intent to deny legitimate users access to a service by consuming the available network bandwidth. A typical attack involves a victim server receiving ICMP packets at a high rate from a wide range of source addresses. Additionally, due to the session-less nature of the ICMP protocol, the source of a packet is easily spoofed making it difficult to find the source of the attack.
Last updated
Not rated
Typical severity
Per MITRE
Not rated
Likelihood of attack
Per MITRE
1
Related weaknesses
CWEs this targets
Standard
Abstraction
MITRE classification
Overview
CAPEC-487 (ICMP Flood) is a standard-level attack pattern catalogued by MITRE in the Common Attack Pattern Enumeration and Classification (CAPEC). It describes a recurring method attackers use to exploit software weaknesses.
What the attacker needs
Prerequisites
- This type of an attack requires the ability to generate a large amount of ICMP traffic to send to the target server.
How to mitigate it
Defenses that reduce the risk of CAPEC-487.
- To mitigate this type of an attack, an organization can enable ingress filtering. Additionally modifications to BGP like black hole routing and sinkhole routing(RFC3882) help mitigate the spoofed source IP nature of these attacks.