Teardrop Attack

What Does Teardrop Attack Mean?

A teardrop attack is a denial of service (DoS) attack conducted by targeting TCP/IP fragmentation reassembly codes. This attack causes fragmented packets to overlap one another on the host receipt; the host attempts to reconstruct them during the process but fails. Gigantic payloads are sent to the machine that is being targeted, causing system crashes.

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Techopedia Explains Teardrop Attack

While much more popular on older versions of Windows, the teardrop attack is also possible on Windows 7 and Windows Vista machines that have SMB enabled. The driver vulnerability on the latter two operating systems was noted in 2009, but Windows 2000 and Windows XP are not vulnerable to this type of teardrop attack, which hones in on TCP ports 139 and 445 on the firewalls of the SMB-enabled machines. If users don’t have patches to protect against this DoS attack, SMBv2 should be disabled, as recommended by Microsoft, and ports 139 and 445 should be blocked.

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Margaret Rouse

Margaret Rouse is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical, business audience. Over the past twenty years her explanations have appeared on TechTarget websites and she's been cited as an authority in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine and Discovery Magazine.Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages. If you have a suggestion for a new definition or how to improve a technical explanation, please email Margaret or contact her…