Talk:Smurf attack

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[edit] Etymology

It would be really nice to have an etymology for this page. It was called a smurf attack because the source file for the original implementation was called smurf.c. But, why did the author choose that name. I believe the term originated in military slang for a style of amplifier. And I believe the military's term originated in the idea of one smurf (Papa smurf) giving an order, and all the other smurfs saying "Yes, Papa smurf!" and carrying it out. But, I do not know this, it is only a guess. Omnifarious 15:17, 12 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Broken link

The link to http://www.netscan.org/ do not work. Should it be removed? --Anka.213 13:27, 15 July 2006 (UTC)

I have done so. We already have a link to the archive.org version of that page, so it isn't really a matter of Wikipedia:Citing sources#What to do when a reference link "goes dead" (although if there are published accounts of how fast systems got fixed, for example in an RFC, CERT publication, etc, that would be worth citing as well). Kingdon 17:25, 16 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] How technical?

I have removed the Template:technical tag from this page. After looking through Wikipedia:Make technical articles accessible, it seems like what this article mostly needed was a sentence or two of non-technical introduction (which I have added). But I may be too close to the subject matter to know what is accessible and what isn't. If people still think there is a problem here, please be specific about which parts of the article are unclear to people who don't live and breathe TCP/IP, and also what information such people would hope to understand about a smurf attack (I'm assuming we don't want a tutorial-level discussion of IP, ICMP, ping, broadcasts, spoofing, and everything else involved, but just a high level description of what a smurf attack can do). Kingdon 18:17, 16 October 2007 (UTC)