The Ping of Death is a type of cyberattack that exploits vulnerabilities in a system’s ability to handle oversized or malformed packets, causing crashes, freezes, or reboots. Despite being considered an old-school method, this attack still poses a threat today when modern devices or poorly configured networks fail to implement proper protections.

What Is the Ping of Death?

At its core, the Ping of Death is a Denial of Service (DoS) attack. It involves sending malicious ping packets, specifically Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) packets that exceed the maximum byte size allowed by the protocol. Typically, a standard ping packet should be no larger than 65,535 bytes, including headers. However, the Ping of Death breaks this limit by sending fragmented packets that reassemble into oversized data when processed by the target system. This overwhelms the memory buffer, causing instability or total system failure.

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