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.
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.
