Should i enable icmp

Ping response times are important because they add overhead to any requests made over the Internet. Block WAN Ping.

This is ideal for preventing unwanted attacks from the Internet when the gateway is left online for extended period of time.

How to Ping Your Modem. You can initiate a modem ping from the command prompt window. The most common problems are Internet traffic slowdowns, longer download times, frequent disconnects and poor signal strength in various locations around your home or business.

Because ICMP has no ports, it does not transport user data or information other than network statistics used for diagnostic and control purposes. Security Security through obscurity is not security.

Supporters of this position believe that it makes their network more secure by obscuring certain elements. Disabling ping does not meaningfully increase security; it only makes troubleshooting and network monitoring much more difficult. If turning off ping increases network security, it only slightly slows down the most basic and unskilled cyber hacker. By disabling SNMP, you significantly hamper your organizations ability to monitor infrastructure. Additionally, not all aspects you wish to monitor may be available outside SNMP since it enjoys broad support.

This can help prevent exposing certain aspects of your network infrastructure to unauthorized individuals while still reaping the benefits of network monitoring. Also, be aware that SNMP versions 1 and 2 do not include encryption and send data in the clear.

Ensure the communication path between your polling engine and monitored device is secure. Alternatively, you may implement SNMP v3 which encrypts all communications between the polling engine and monitored device. SNMP v1 or v2 should never be transmitted over the Internet unless though an encrypted tunnel. ICMP is much more than echo request and echo reply ping ; it is also used for traceroute and time exceeded.

If Path MTU Discovery is unable to function, excessively large packets may be transmitted without fragmentation and will fail to reach the destination.

This will lead to a retransmission loop with the same MTU only to be dropped again and again. Filtering ICMP will not lead to increased security, but it will make it more difficult to diagnose network issues and resolve configuration errors.

Don't disable ping or filter ICMP unless you have advanced network knowledge and know exactly what you are doing. The disadvantages of disabling ICMP far outweigh the few benefits of doing so. Numerous studies and users report the benefits of network monitoring: increased availability and organizations appreciating a proactive, rather than reactive approach from their system administrators. We cannot improve what we do not measure… or monitor.

What are your experiences? Just drop us a comment below! Because ICMP can also be used by a potential adversary to perform reconnaissance against a target network, and due to historical denial-of-service bugs in broken implementations of ICMP, some network administrators block all ICMP traffic as a network hardening measure.

In this blog post, we review the beliefs for why administrators are motivated to block ICMP, the reasons why this is not an effective security measure against any level of targeted attack, and side effects of blocking ICMP that break legitimate network functionality. Finally, we suggest ways to block only the parts of ICMP that allow network discovery for networks where this is a concern. ICMP is also used by network devices to send error messages, which describe a problem encountered while attempting to deliver a datagram.

Network administrators can use these messages to troubleshoot internet connectivity issues. For example, a gateway or destination host will send an ICMP message to the source host if an error or an event that requires warning has surfaced e. Many are deprecated or reserved for various reasons; ten types of ICMP messages relevant to modern networks are shown in Table 1. Within each message type, there are several codes to identify a specific condition or request. Network administrators often opt to disable ICMP on network devices to evade network mapping applications used by adversaries e.

Unwarranted actions such as network discovery attacks, covert communication channels, and network traffic redirection could all be executed with ICMP enabled, which include but are not limited to:. By disabling the ICMP protocol, diagnostics, reliability, and network performance may suffer as a result see page 4—4 of [2].

Important mechanisms are disabled when the ICMP protocol is restricted. Disabling the full ICMP protocol may not be a good approach in securing network devices. Instead disabling a subset of ICMP types provide fine-grained control over which types of ICMP messages network devices could request, receive, and respond to.