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Ping Of Death


Definition - What does Ping Of Death mean?

Ping of Death (PoD) is a type of network attack in which an attacker sends a network packet that is larger than what the target computer can handle. This can crash the computer, or freeze or degrade computer service. Ping of death is used to make a computer system unstable by deliberately sending larger ping packets to the target system over an IPv4 network.

Ping of death is also known as long ICMP.

Techopedia explains Ping Of Death

PoD is primarily a type of denial of service (DoS) attack that was prevalent in legacy systems. PoD is conducted using the ping command. Within IPv4 based networks, a ping command’s total payload size is 84 bytes and the maximum size of network packet a computer can handle is 65,536 bytes. To initiate a PoD, the attacker sends a ping packet larger than 65,536 bytes, which makes the system unstable, or causes it to freeze, crash or reboot.
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