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A Ping of Death attack is a denial-of-service (DoS) attack, in which the attacker aims to disrupt a targeted machine by sending a packet larger than the maximum allowable size, causing the target machine to freeze or crash. The original Ping of Death attack is less common today. A related attack known as an ICMP flood attack is more prevalent.Is ping of death attack specific to ICMP or could it also happen with other transport protocols?

Anders
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parii
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  • OP said: "Is ping of death attack specific to ICMP or could it also happen with other transport protocols?" ICMP is not a "transport protocol" it is a protocol at the network layer (below the transport layer). That's why, for example, it does not have "port" associated with it. – hft Dec 15 '17 at 00:42

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The ping of death was caused by a bug in handling invalid packets. Such bugs are not restricted to ICMP but can happen with other protocols too. In fact, the more complex a protocol is the more likely bugs in handling unexpected data will be. For example in 2016 Cisco ASA had a critical bug in which it was possible for an attacker to execute code on the machine (CVE-2016-1287) with a malformed IKE (UDP) packet. Or in 2011 it was possible to DOS the Apache web server with a few crafted HTTP (TCP) requests (CVE-2011-3192). Other examples are the SQL Slammer worm which caused major disruptions of internet traffic in 2003 and could be triggered by a single UDP packet. And there are many more cases.

Steffen Ullrich
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