Month: November 2009

How to use IPtables to block ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol) requests? Ans : To do this we have understand why we require this thing should be done. When Hackers try to hack in to any machine first thing they will do is a basic ping test. Code :#ping target-machine If this is succeed they will come to a conclusion that system is up and they can go forward and they can do DDOS attacks or try to find some other open ports using NMAP command.Code :#nmap target-machineSo if you are exposing a machine to outer world from your network, first disable incoming ping requests to your machine as follows.So this can be done by two ways through IPtables 1. Reject the ICMP packets. 2. Drop the ICMP packets. In the above mentioned methods best thing is to drop the ICMP packets, by doing this we are not giving any clue to hacker whether the system is alive or not. Where as if we do reject definitely hacker will come to know that ICMP packets are blocked and the system is live. Step1 : Executing following command to drop all the incoming ICMP packets #iptables –A INPUT –p icmp –icmp-type echo-request –j DROP Let me explain this command -A is to append this rule to already existing one. INPUT specifies that it’s a Step2 : Save this changes to...