A ping storm is a condition in which the Internet ping program is used to send a flood of packets to a server to test its ability to handle a high amount of traffic or, maliciously, to make the server inoperable. Although the ping support in Windows operating systems does not allow someone to mount a ping storm, the ping command in at least some UNIX-based systems offers two options: "ping -f" which specifies to output ping packets back as fast as they are returned, and "ping -s[packetsize]", which causes the size of the outgoing packet to be padded by some specified size in order to increase the load on the receiving server.
A ping storm is one form of packet storm.
Contributor(s): Simon Smith
This was last updated in September 1999
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