Ping of death is a type of denial of service attack that sends a signal larger than a device can handle, resulting in a system shutdown, reboot, or freeze. It became popular in the late 1990s but has mostly been eliminated due to fixes in operating system software. It has been replaced by other forms of denial of service attacks, such as ping floods.
A ping of death is a form of denial of service attack that can be launched against a computer, router, server, printer, and other device over a network such as the Internet. This type of attack became quite popular among malicious computer users in the late 1990s who wanted to overwhelm and shut down other computers and servers. Since that time, however, these types of attacks have mostly been eliminated due to fixes in the operating system (OS) software for computers and servers. A ping of death attack is a signal sent to a computer or other device that is actually larger than the device can handle, resulting in a system shutdown, reboot, or freeze.
Sometimes referred to as a “Ping o’ Death” or POD, a ping of death refers to an older type of malicious computer attack that has largely been replaced by other forms of denial of service attacks since the turn of the 21st century. To understand what a POD is, it’s often easier to first understand what a “ping” is in general. A ping is a signal sent between two computers or similar systems, which is used to evaluate how fast a signal can transfer between systems and assess whether or not a signal has been lost. It was established as a common practice in the early 1980s and got its name from the sound made when using sonar to detect objects based on reflected sound waves.
According to standard Internet protocols (IP), the maximum size of the IP packet that can be sent is 65,535 bytes. This is not an absolute limit, but has been established as a practical limit for keeping systems tidy. One of the main characteristics of IP communication, however, is fragmentation which allows a large packet to be broken up into smaller packets which are transmitted and reassembled before being processed by a receiving system. In the 1990s, people discovered that using this fragmentation, smaller packets could be sent as a ping signal that, when reassembled, would exceed the 65,535-byte limit; when this message, the ping of death, was then processed, the receiving system would shut down, reboot, or crash.
Once ping of death attacks started crashing systems, software designers were quick to find ways to protect systems. Eventually, patches were released for existing software and hardware, with later software using similar protection, to allow systems to determine the size of the fragmented packet before reassembly and to dump the packet if it exceeds the size limit. While a POD attack is unlikely to work on most modern systems, there are other types of denial of service attacks that have replaced it, such as ping floods.
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