[GTALUG] Ubuntu -- Disabling Ping

David Collier-Brown davec-b at rogers.com
Thu Aug 30 12:23:04 EDT 2018


On 2018-08-30 12:12 p.m., James Knott via talk wrote:
> On 08/30/2018 12:04 PM, Alvin Starr via talk wrote:
>> There are other ICMP messages that can be used for probing like
>> timestamp(msg-13).
>> All around all disabling ping does for you is to make it harder for
>> your ISP or IT support people to see if you are having network
>> problems and the really really stupid script kiddies trying to probe you.
> There are some who advocate blocking ICMP entirely.  As mentioned, it
> can cause problems for legitimate testing and, on IPv6, cause failures.


At one time, a maliciously crafted packet could be used to do 
buffer-overflow attacks. It hit Windows most recently, and many sites 
turned off ICMP. This merely made it harder, and the script kiddies 
promptly came up with new variants. To this day, Windows sites often 
turn off ICMP, thinking the problem was with ping.

--dave

-- 
David Collier-Brown,         | Always do right. This will gratify
System Programmer and Author | some people and astonish the rest
davecb at spamcop.net           |                      -- Mark Twain



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