2014-04-26 10:52:28 -04:00
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Ping O' Death
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2014-04-26 11:54:15 -04:00
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n. A notorious exploit that (when first discovered) could be easily used to
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crash a wide variety of machines by overrunning size limits in their TCP/IP
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stacks. First revealed in late 1996. The open-source Unix community patched
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its systems to remove the vulnerability within days or weeks, the
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closed-source OS vendors generally took months. While the difference in
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response times repeated a pattern familiar from other security incidents,
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the accompanying glare of Web-fueled publicity proved unusually embarrassing
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to the OS vendors and so passed into history and myth. The term is now used
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to refer to any nudge delivered by network wizards over the network that
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causes bad things to happen on the system being nudged. For the full story
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on the original exploit, see
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http://www.insecure.org/sploits/ping-o-death.html. Compare kamikaze packet
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and 'Chernobyl packet.
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