In a Ping Flood, attackers use “ping” which is a variant of an ICMP and send highly-spoofed ping (IMCP echo requests) packets at a very high rate and from random source IP ranges or as the IP address of the victim. Attackers can consume all available network resources and bandwidth exhausting the network until it goes offline. Since the PING requests are most often well-formed and highly-spoofed, a PING attack cannot be easily detected by deep packet inspection or other detection techniques.
