What Is Phlooding ?

Wednesday 15 November 2006 @ 3:04 am

We have heard about phishing, but have you heard about phlooding?

According to AirMagnet Inc, one of the leaders in wireless LAN (WLAN) security and performance solutions, phlooding is a new exploit describes a group of simultaneous but geographically distributed attacks that targets a business’s authentication or network log-in structure, with the goal of overloading its central authentication server.

Quoted:
In a phlooding attack, several attackers in different locations bombard wireless access points (APs) with login requests using multiple password combinations in what are known as â€œdictionaryâ€ attacks. This creates a â€œfloodâ€ of authentication requests to the company’s central authentication server, which could slow down logins and potentially interfere with broader network operations, since many different users and applications often validate themselves against the same identity management server for email access, database applications, and other corporate uses. Phlooding could effectively block broadband VPN or firewall connections that use a common authentication server to verify an incoming user’s identity, making it temporarily impossible for employees to access their corporate network.

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