What is the Ping of Death ?

The Ping of Death is a large ICMP packet. The target receives the ping in fragments and starts reassembling the packet. However, due to the size of the packet once it is reassembled, it is too big for the buffer and overflows it. This causes unpredictable results, such as reboots or system hangs.

Windows NT is capable of sending such a packet. By simply typing in "ping -165527 -s 1 target" you can send such a ping. There are also source code examples available for Unix platforms that allow large ping packets to be constructed. These sources are freely available.

Most systems have patches available to prevent the Ping of Death from working. However, it is still included here for historical reasons, as the Ping of Death helped get the whole DoS craze really going, since it was so easy to perform.
 

source: nmrc -

Ping of Death