Attacks & Threats
Ping of Death
Also known as: PoD
Definition
A legacy denial-of-service attack that sends malformed or oversized ICMP echo packets, causing vulnerable TCP/IP stacks to crash, hang, or reboot when reassembling them.
Examples
- Sending fragmented ICMP echo requests that reassemble to over 65,535 bytes to crash an unpatched Windows 95 host.
- Modern variants targeting IPv6 fragment reassembly in older embedded TCP/IP stacks.
Related terms
Denial-of-Service (DoS) Attack
An attack that exhausts a system's bandwidth, compute, memory, or application resources so that legitimate users can no longer access the service.
Teardrop Attack
A legacy DoS attack that sends IP fragments with overlapping, malformed offsets to crash TCP/IP stacks that mishandle reassembly.
LAND Attack
A legacy DoS attack that sends a spoofed TCP SYN packet whose source IP and port equal the destination, causing vulnerable systems to loop or crash.
SYN Flood
A TCP-based denial-of-service attack that sends many SYN packets without completing the three-way handshake, exhausting the target's connection-state resources.
Smurf Attack
A legacy amplification DDoS that sends ICMP echo requests to a network's broadcast address with the victim's IP spoofed as the source, causing every host on that network to reply to the victim.
Buffer Overflow
A memory-safety flaw where a program writes past the end of an allocated buffer, corrupting adjacent memory and often enabling code execution.