Warning: Malicious use of SYN-floods are punishable by law.

This post shows howto to establish a synflood attack on an arbitrary remote host. The attack is performed using hping, which is free packet generator and analyzer for the TCP/IP protocol. Hping is one of the de facto tools for security auditing and testing of firewalls and networks. A syn-flood attack is basically a DOS-attack on a bug in TCP – some will argue that TCP is defective by design ;)

The actual attack is initialized by this command:

hping -i u1 -S -p 80 dst-host-or-ip

In most cases DoS attacks like this one renders a webserver totally unable to serve any requests from users.

To get hping installed on a Debian or Ubuntu-based system, type this to install:

aptitude install hping2