Blocking external probes

Protection against attacks is important, but attackers often use vulnerabilities and network tools to gather information about your network to plan an attack. It is often easier to prevent an attacker from learning important details about your network than to defend against an attack designed to exploit your particular network.

Attacks are often tailored to the hardware or operating system of the target, so reconnaissance is often the first step. The IP addresses of the hosts, the open ports, and the operating systems the hosts are running is invaluable information to an attacker. Probing your network can be as simple as an attacker performing an address sweep or port scan to a more involved operation like sending TCP packets with invalid combinations of flags to see how your firewall reacts.

Address sweeps

An address sweep is a basic network scanning technique to determine which addresses in an address range have active hosts. A typical address sweep involves sending an ICMP ECHO request (a ping) to each address in an address range to attempt to get a response. A response signifies that there is a host at this address that responded to the ping. It then becomes a target for more detailed and potentially invasive attacks.

Address sweeps do not always reveal all the hosts in an address range because some systems may be configured to ignore ECHO requests and not respond, and some firewalls and gateways may be configured to prevent ECHO requests from being transmitted to the destination network. Despite this shortcoming, Address sweeps are still used because they are simple to perform with software tools that automate the process.

Use the icmp_sweep anomaly in a DoS policy to protect against address sweeps.

There are a number of IPS signatures to detect the use of ICMP probes that can gather information about your network. These signatures include AddressMask, Traceroute, ICMP.Invalid.Packet.Size, and ICMP.Oversized.Packet. Include ICMP protocol signatures in your IPS sensors to protect against these probes/attacks.