A type of denial of service attack relevant in the 1990s has resurfaced with surprising potency against modern-day firewalls. Dubbed a BlackNurse attack, the technique leverages a low-volume Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) -based attack on vulnerable firewalls made by Cisco, Palo Alto, SonicWall and others, according to researchers.
TDC Security Operations Center, a security firm that published a technical report (PDF) on BlackNurse this week, said the attack is more traditionally called a “ping flood attack.” In this type of assault, traffic volume doesn’t matter as much as the type of packets sent, researchers said.
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