ETHICAL HACKING NET-185-001N Week 10

This week, one of the things that I learned about was more information on denial of service attacks.   A particularly nasty denial of service vulnerability is found in Intel (formerly Texas Instruments) Puma cable modem chipsets.  All Puma series chipsets will stop passing traffic if they are receiving traffic from too many IP addresses at once, and this is a lower threshold than most other devices due to details of the architecture.  The Puma 6 also has problems with cyclical increases in latency of ~300 milliseconds, which causes performance issues for even normal web browsing, not to mention making any-sort of real-time gaming very difficult.  (http://badmodems.com).  I reviewed information about the 'ping of death' that I first learned of in the late 1990's or early 2000's from the film http://Warriorsofthe.net, which is worth watching if you haven't (it also has good music).  I researched SYN and ping floods, and learned about attacks targeting FTP servers with bad passwords (which crash the whole FTP serving program).  I know that rather ironically, most software testers have to be pushed to simulate malicious or bizarre user behavior in testing, such as deliberately entering text not suitable for a field (such as entering a name into a field that is supposed to be for postal codes only).  (It is possible for someone to have a very unusual name that incorporated numbers such as 555 95472, for example, or Ebenn Q3 Baobab).  I reviewed information about the Fraggle and Smurf attacks, which are kinds of distributed denial of service attacks that send packets requesting a response to with a spoofed IP address which belongs to the victim, which is flooded with traffic, which may crash it or otherwise disrupt its normal network connectivity.  Both are named after popular children's shows featuring small creatures that defeat relative giants, similar to the nature of the attacks.