what is a ping?

Question

my security center said someone tried to ping my computer. what does that mean?

Answer 1

They sent a request from their computer to yours to see if it was online or not.

It may have been a real person or an automated bot on the internet seeing which computers are online in order to plan an attack.

Ping is not specific to any operating system. It uses the ICMP protocol.

Answer 2

PING - Packet InterNet Groper - A utility used to determine what devices are available and responsive on a network or at an internet site. A ping by its self is not a security problem, but if an address is found to be "alive", it can prompt the person pinging you to try more aggressive methods to get into the responding device.

Answer 3

A ping is a simple diagnostic tool that helps detect if two computers can 'see' each other.
i.e whether they are connected.

Your security center is trying to verify you are connected to them over the network.

You can also try this on your computer to verify if you are connected to the internet.

For example, if you are running windows....

Get to a Dos prompt,
(the black screen with a little > at the bottom left).
You can get to that by going to Accessories and selecting Command Prompt.

Then type "Ping www.yahoo.com" (I just picked www.yahoo.com because it is an internet locations (site/address) that is normally available, any internet site will do).

It should look something like this when the address can't be found:

C:\>ping yahoo
Ping request could not find host yahoo. Please check the name and try again.

and like this when it can find it:

C:\>ping www.yahoo.com

Pinging www.yahoo-ht2.akadns.net [209.191.93.52] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 209.191.93.52: bytes=32 time=40ms TTL=53
Reply from 209.191.93.52: bytes=32 time=40ms TTL=53
Reply from 209.191.93.52: bytes=32 time=43ms TTL=53
Reply from 209.191.93.52: bytes=32 time=42ms TTL=53

Ping statistics for 209.191.93.52:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 40ms, Maximum = 43ms, Average = 41ms

(By the way you can see that the www.yahooo.com address (also known as a URL) is a mnemonic address that translates to the real address 209.191.93.52)

Answer 4

Ping means to send out a signal to another computer. If that computer exists then it will send a signal back. The time it takes to return the signal tells you how fast your internet speed is. If someone pinged your computer, it means someone tried to find out if you are there. It's basically the first thing you do before you start to connect to another computer. ie hack.

Answer 5

ping is a unix command used to figure out if someone/some program is trying to access your computer.
Its used to figure out if that machine is reachable or not.
Firewalls/Security Systems disallow pings, so that hackers/weird programs dont try to get into your machine that way.