Ping O' Death
Ping O' Death: n. A notorious exploit that (when first
discovered) could be easily used to crash a wide variety of machines
by overunning size limits in their TCP/IP stacks. First revealed in
late 1996. The open-source Unix community patched its systems to
remove the vulnerability within days or weeks, the closed-source OS
vendors generally took months. While the difference in response
times repeated a pattern familiar from other security incidents, the
accompanying glare of Web-fueled publicity proved unusually
embarrassing to the OS vendors and so passed into history and myth.
The term is now used to refer to any nudge delivered by network
wizards over the network that causes bad things to happen on the
system being nudged. For the full story on the original exploit, see
`http://www.insecure.org/sploits/ping-o-death.html'.
Compare with 'kamikaze packet,' 'Finger of Death' and 'Chernobyl
packet.'
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