A smurf attack is historically one of the oldest techniques to perform a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) amplification attack. This attack consists of sending a series of ICMP echo requests, with a spoofed source IP address to the network broadcast address. When this echo request is broadcast, all hosts on the LAN should simultaneously reply to the target for each spoofed request received. This technique is less effective against modern systems, as most will not reply to IP-directed broadcast traffic.
To perform a smurf attack, you will need to have a LAN with multiple systems running on it. In the examples provided, an installation of Ubuntu is used as a scan target. For more information on setting up Ubuntu, please refer to the Installing Ubuntu Server recipe in Chapter 1, Getting Started, of this book.