Ping of death
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- Ping of Death can also mean Ping of Death (POD)-Bots, a type of computer game bot used in Counter-Strike.
A ping of death (abbreviated "POD") is a type of attack on a computer that involves sending a malformed or otherwise malicious ping to a computer. A ping is normally 64 bytes in size; many computer systems cannot handle a ping larger than the maximum IP packet size which is 65,535 bytes. Sending a ping of this size often crashes the target computer.
This bug has traditionally been relatively easy to exploit. Generally, sending a ping packet of a size such as 65,536 bytes is illegal according to networking protocol, but a packet of such a size can be sent if it is fragmented; when the target computer reassembles the packet, a buffer overflow can occur, which often causes a system crash.
This exploit has affected a wide variety of systems, including Unix, Linux, Mac, Windows, printers, and routers. However most systems since 1997-1998 or so have been fixed, so this bug is mostly historical.
It should be noted that in the recent years a different kind of ping attack has become wide-spread, ping flooding. The idea is to simply flood the victim with so much ping traffic that normal traffic will fail to reach the system.
