How to disable ping in Linux

By Luis Freitas

While ping is a very useful command for discovering network topology, the disadvantage is that it does just that, and makes it easier for hackers on the network to target live servers. But you can tell Linux to ignore all pings – the server simply won’t respond. There are a number of ways to achieve this, but the best is to use sysctl. To turn off ping replies:

sysctl -w net.ipv4.icmp_echo_ignore_all=1

To turn it back on, again use:

sysctl -w net.ipv4.icmp_echo_ignore_all=0