Hello.
I'm Matt Glass, and welcome to this course on Impact with Low Orbit Ion Cannon,
or LOIC.
In this course, I'll show you how to use LOIC to send large volumes of TCP,
UDP, and HTTP packets to target hosts and services.
You'll also learn how to control multiple hosts running
LOIC to execute distributed attacks.
But first, let's look at what LOIC is and how it's used.
Low Orbit Ion Cannon is an open source network stress tool
originally created by Praetox Technologies.
This tool is available on GitHub and is currently
managed by multiple contributors.
LOIC is designed to send a large volume of packets
targeted at a host domain name, website or IP address.
You can download versions of this tool from GitHub or
clone the repository using Git.
Once loaded on your host, LOIC is very easy to operate.
You can also connect LOIC to an IRC channel using Hive Mind mode and
control numerous instances with single commands.
On the kill chain, LOIC falls under action, the impact phase of an attack.
It is not used for any previous phase as it does not allow you to
discover vulnerabilities or gain access to a network.
LOIC is a single‑purpose tool for conducting denial‑of‑service and
distributed denial‑of‑service attacks on your targets.
The ATT&CK knowledge base developed by MITRE categorizes
adversary tactics and techniques into multiple categories to
describe the adversary's behavior.
The tactics are categories that cover different phases of an
attack and allow defensive teams to model an adversary's actions
and improve the defense of their networks.
We'll cover two techniques that LOIC can be used for.
The first is service direct network flood,
which is a sub‑technique of the network denial‑of‑service technique.
The second is service exhaustion flood,
which is a sub‑technique of the endpoint denial‑of‑service technique.
Low Orbit Ion Cannon can accomplish this by enabling
adversaries to quickly and easily deploy a tool that sends
large volumes of packets at their target.
They could use a single instance of LOIC to send traffic to a target and
attempt to impact their performance of that network or service. Adversaries
could also connect multiple LOIC instances together using Hive Mind and
have a far greater impact on targets,
denying legitimate use of the application, host or network to its users.