A ping packet can be made unsuitable for performing a DoS attack by sending continuous ping packets to the target IP address. This attack is called Ping of Death. Continuous ping will cause a buffer overflow on the target system and cause it to crash.
We often use the CMD command “Ping” to mainly check if a server or gateway is up and running. However, the ping command can also be used for some other purposes.
Looking at the basics, a ping packet is generally 56 bytes or 84 bytes in size (including IP headers). However, a ping packet can also be as large as 65,536 bytes.
Well, this is the negative side of the ping packet. When the size of the ping packet increases abnormally, forming an unsuitable packet to attack a system, this type of attack is called a “Ping of death” attack.
How does the Ping of death attack work?
Not all computers can handle data larger than a fixed size. So, when a Ping of death packet is sent from a computer (originating computer) to a target machine, the ping packet is fragmented into smaller groups of packets.
A fragment consists of 8 octets. When these packets reach the target computer, they arrive in fragments. Thus, the target computer reassembles the improper packets it receives into fragments. However, the entire reassembled packet causes a buffer on the target computer.
This buffer flow often causes system crashes, making the system more vulnerable to attacks.
Once the system becomes more vulnerable to attacks, it allows more attacks, such as injecting a trojan horse into the target machine.
A simple tutorial on how to perform DoS attack using Ping of death with CMD:
Warning: This is for educational purposes only. It's nothing special but you can use it to learn.
Let's see the steps:
- Open Notepad
- Copy the following text into notepad
[su_note note_color=”#f3db91″ radius=”7″]:loop
ping
goto :loop[/su_note]
In the above command, replace<IP διεύθυνση> with an IP address.
- Save Notepad with any name. For example, dos.txt
- Right-click on dos.txt and click 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 multiple pings.
