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.

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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.