Ping of Death

A Ping of Death is an ICMP packet, which creates a buffer overflow due to a bug in the implementation of the Internet Protocol on many operating systems at the receiver. Network packets that are larger than the permissible MTU ( 1500 bytes in Ethernet widely used ) are usually divided into smaller fragments, and reassembled at the receiver. To facilitate the reassembly onwards, each fragment has a size and an offset, which specifies the position in the overall package. However, it is possible to combine the last fragment and a fragment size of an offset so that the overall package is greater than the maximum 65,535 bytes. In the composition of such a package are at the receiver may overwrite internal variables and brought the system to crash.

As a rule, this vulnerable systems are patched or are no longer in use. Were affected in addition to Windows NT and Windows 95 also many Unix derivatives such as AIX, HP- UX, Linux and Solaris.

After the error has been eliminated in 2007 for the Solaris OS, he was initially than eliminated. However, it was announced in August 2013 that Windows Server 2012 still contained an error that can lead to failures. At the same time it was announced that various versions of Windows are vulnerable to a variant of the Ping of Death, which is based on ICMPv6. This vulnerability has been with the patches, which were in the course of the patch Days published in August 2013 by Microsoft, is closed.