While play a really good deathmatch in Quake 2 tonight my broadband connection starting giving me jit! My ping went from 20/30 up to 987! I lost the connection to the server I was playing on. Looked at the log of my PC-cillin Firewall and it reported someone commited a Smurf attack. From CERT Advisory: "The two main components to the smurf denial-of-service attack are the use of forged ICMP echo request packets and the direction of packets to IP broadcast addresses.

The Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) is used to handle errors and exchange control messages. ICMP can be used to determine if a machine on the Internet is responding. To do this, an ICMP echo request packet is sent to a machine. If a machine receives that packet, that machine will return an ICMP echo reply packet. A common implementation of this process is the "ping" command, which is included with many operating systems and network software packages. ICMP is used to convey status and error information including notification of network congestion and of other network transport problems. ICMP can also be a valuable tool in diagnosing host or network problems.

In the "smurf" attack, attackers are using ICMP echo request packets directed to IP broadcast addresses from remote locations to generate denial-of-service attacks. There are three parties in these attacks: the attacker, the intermediary, and the victim (note that the intermediary can also be a victim). "

Why the hell would anyone want to do such a pointless thing? Is there someone sitting somewhere going "huh huh cool man i made someone connection freeze up for two minutes".

POINTLESS!!