Why would I get pinged 140 times in 10 minutes?

[Unsecured Loner]

The pings are from almost as many unique IP addresses from all over the U.S. and Europe. I am clueless. Zonealarm seems to be keeping me in stealth mode. I don't use ICQ or any other chat program.

BTW I'm now up to 212 pings.

[This message has been edited by Unsecured Loner (edited 07-14-2000).]

[jjsole]

I use zonealarm also, and have used other firewall software, and experience the same thing. BlackIce Defender is better at identifying the type of ping. Most are from potential hackers scanning wide ranges of domain numbers for computers that have unknowingly downloaded a 'trojan horse' program. If the computer has, and there is no firewall, the trojan will respond to the ping, alerting the hacker that that computer is vulnerable. Others that it identified are from my isp, and some are from others on my cable modem isp, which gets pings from other users of the same service inadvertently by their network settings searching for who's on the network.

I've found Zonealarm to be an excellent firewall, and best of all its free. www.grc.com. (http://www.grc.com.) It faired better than BlackIce in some of the port tests on this site.

[socalgal]

It could be a smurf attack. This is where a perp sends a large amount of ICMP echo (ping) traffic at IP broadcast addresses, all of it having a spoofed source address of the victim/s, which would account for the different IPs.

A mutant of the smurf is a fraggle attack, which uses UDP echo packets in the same fashion as the ICMP echo packets.

A good source of info can be found at www.networkice.com (http://www.networkice.com)

More info on pings: http://www.networkice.com/advice/intrusions/2000102/default.htm



[This message has been edited by socalgal (edited 07-14-2000).]

[Unsecured Loner]

Thanks for the info. I am somewhat relieved.

[CMonster]

Is that ALL the pings you are getting? Let me know your IP address and I will ping you 140 times a minute! http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/smile.gif I guess the rest of these replies already covered it...hackers suck - these guys need another hobby.