Exploitation Caveats
The attack requires a successful TCP 3 way handshake to effectively fill the victims connection tables. This limits the attack's effectiveness as an attacker cannot spoof the client IP address to avoid traceability.
A sockstress style exploit also needs access to raw sockets on the attacking machine because the packets must be handled in userspace rather than with the OS's connect API. Raw sockets are disabled on Windows XP SP2 and above, but device drivers are readily available to put this facility back into Windows. The exploit is able to be executed as-is on other platforms with raw sockets such as *nix and requires root (superuser) privileges.
Read more about this topic: Sockstress
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