What is MAC flooding? How are LANCOM switches protected from this?
MAC flooding occurs when a massive number of data packets with different MAC addresses is sent to the switch. Conventional switches store every one of these MAC addresses until the internal memory overflows. At this moment, what was an intelligent switch starts operating like a hub, i.e. instead of defining the recipient, it simply transmits all of the data packets to every terminal in the network. This potentially gives an attacker access to all of the network traffic. To avoid attacks of this type, managed switches from LANCOM can be set with a MAC address learning limit. This prevents the switch from becoming a central bottle-neck.
