Ping of Death:Dos Attack

This vulnerability is quite well known and was earlier commonly used to hang remote systems (or even force them to reboot) so that no users can use its services. This exploit no longer works, as almost all system administrators would have upgraded their systems making them safe from such attacks. In this attack, the target system is pinged with a data packet that exceeds the maximum bytes allowed by TCP/IP, which are 65500 packets. This would have almost always caused the remote system to hang, reboot or crash.

This DOS attack could be carried out even through the command line, in the following manner:

The following Ping command creates a giant packet size 65500 for Ping. It might hang the victim's computer:

C:\windows>ping (ip address) –l 65500

Example:  C:\windows>ping 10.0.0.1 –l 65500

Continues ping

C:\windows>ping  10.0.0.1 –l 65500 –t