Ping of death

Most operating systems to year 1998 had defined maximum size of ping packet to 64 bytes. During ping of death attack, hacker sent packets larger than 64 bytes to the system to crash it. This vulnerability is fixed in all of modern Operating systems making it rather historical bug, though still worth examining. Even though packers that large weren’t not allowed in network protocol they could be sent in fragments and caused buffer overflow while receiving system reassembled back together. Buffer overflow means, that application is trying to store more data than it’s allowed in memory space defined for it thereby pushing additional bytes to random locations in computer memory. Ping of death attacks were especially dangerous because most operating systems were vulnerable to it and attacker didn’t have to have any information about the target system other than it’s IP address. As all the requests could be spoofed, identifying the attacker was nearly impossible.
Even though ping of death attack in it’s literal sense is dead a modern day equivalent for it is just sending more ping requests to victim than their system can handle, thereby causing a denial of service.