constant ping

[dre]

hello all
i searched for the proper forum--this seemed like my only choice. my question is this---is there any way to stop an onrush of continous pings ?
i recently installed mcafees--internet security suite. i set it up to monitor incoming traffic. i suppose without a firewall previous to this one-- i could not see this constant barrage. some days i get as many as 800 i have had up to 4700 pings in a 12 hour period . numerous ones are from china , japan , amsterdam , etc . i am running windows98 and cannot believe the constant pings aren't slowing my computer down. i know i can stop mcafees from showing the alerts to the pings-- but i can't get it out of my head that this is still going on . any ideas ?
thanks

i came , i saw , i wondered

[LowWaterMark]

You can't really stop this kind of traffic from coming your way because it is nothing you are doing that is causing it in the first place. In the case of large amounts of unsolicited inbound packets, whether pings or attempts to connect to specific service ports, most of this traffic is caused by infected machines out on the Internet. There are probably millions of infected machines out there, and the worms many are infected with are simply trying to see if other machines can be found to infect. You have to start thinking of this activity as simply background noice and just ignore it. Also, the levels you report are neither out of the ordinary, (from what many people see in the same amount of time), nor are they impacting your performance at all. 4700 pings sounds like a lot, but in a twelve hour period, it's nothing to your PC. The levels would have to go orders of magnitude higher to impact your performance.

Here's an old thread that has a little about setting a firewall to ignore such traffic. It only covers a couple other software firewalls, but the general ideas are still helpful.

http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=12936

[CrazyM]

Hi dre

... and welcome to Wilders :)

-{ Quote: "some days i get as many as 800 i have had up to 4700 pings in a 12 hour period . numerous ones are from china , japan , amsterdam , etc ." }-
As LWM commented, this is quite normal. A quick check of my logs for the last few days it has varied from 800+ to 1000+ unsolicited inbound packets per day. In addition to infected systems being a potential source of these unsolicited packets, there is also quite a bit of messenger spam going around these days.

One site you can check for trends, port info, etc. is Internet Storm Center (http://isc.sans.org/).

Regards,

CrazyM

[Stephanos G.]

Same here using ZA 6.
Thanks LowWaterMark and CrazyM for the explanation. Maybe this is a good example why the usage of firewalls is essential for every pc.