Attacks & Threats
LAND Attack
Definition
A legacy DoS attack that sends a spoofed TCP SYN packet whose source IP and port equal the destination, causing vulnerable systems to loop or crash.
Examples
- Sending a SYN packet from 10.0.0.1:80 to 10.0.0.1:80 to lock up an unpatched Windows 95 host.
- A modern LAND-style packet causing a CPU spike on a vulnerable industrial controller.
Related terms
Denial-of-Service (DoS) Attack
An attack that exhausts a system's bandwidth, compute, memory, or application resources so that legitimate users can no longer access the service.
SYN Flood
A TCP-based denial-of-service attack that sends many SYN packets without completing the three-way handshake, exhausting the target's connection-state resources.
Ping of Death
A legacy denial-of-service attack that sends malformed or oversized ICMP echo packets, causing vulnerable TCP/IP stacks to crash, hang, or reboot when reassembling them.
Teardrop Attack
A legacy DoS attack that sends IP fragments with overlapping, malformed offsets to crash TCP/IP stacks that mishandle reassembly.
IP Spoofing
Forging the source IP address of network packets to impersonate another host, bypass filters, or amplify denial-of-service attacks.
Smurf Attack
A legacy amplification DDoS that sends ICMP echo requests to a network's broadcast address with the victim's IP spoofed as the source, causing every host on that network to reply to the victim.