Shortly : A ping packet can also malformed to perform denial of service attack by sending continuous ping packets to the target IP address. A continuous ping will cause buffer overflow at the target system and will cause the target system to crash.
we often use the CMD command “Ping” to mostly check if a server or a gateway is up and running. But, ping command can also be used for some other purposes.
If we look at the level basic, then a ping packet is generally of size 56 bytes or 84 bytes ( include IP header as well ). However, a ping packet can also be made as large as up to 65636 bytes.
Well, that’s the negative side of ping packet. When we increase the size of ping packet unnaturally, forming a malformed ping packet to attack a computer system, this type of attack is called “Ping of Death” attack.
How Ping of Death Works?
Not all computers can handle data large than a fixed size. So, when a ping of death packet sent from a source computer to target machine, the ping packet gets fragmented into smaller group of packets.
One fragment is of 8 octets size. When these packets reach the target computer, they arrive in fragments. So the target computer reassembles the malformed which are received in chunks. But the whole assembled packet causes buffer overflow at the target computer.
This buffer overflow often causes the system crash making the system more vulnerable to attack.
Once the system becomes more vulnerable to attack, it allows more like the injection of Trojan horse on the target machine.
A simple tutorial on how to perform DoS attack using ping of death using CMD:
Here are the steps:
- Open notepad
- Type :
- : loop
- Ping <IP address> -l 65600 -w 1 -n 1
- Goto: loop
In the above command, replace <IP address> with IP address
Save Notepad with any name. Let’s say dos.txt
Right click on the dos.txt and click on rename.
Change the extension from .txt to .bat
So, now the file name should be dos.bat
Double click on it and you will see a command prompt running with a lot of pings
