Microsoft Patch Tuesday: The '90s called. It wants its 'Ping of Death' back Microsoft has pushed out eight advisories as part of the August edition of its regular Patch Tuesday update cycle. With just three critical patches, the most interesting thing about this week's batch is the return of the "Ping of Death" in the form of a stability bug in the Windows IPv6 stack. The critical updates offer new …
A cheeky colleague at a previous employer had an automated ping of death that he'd use when bored. This was around the time of the "Back Orifice" application, which he'd also use as a practical joke, momentarily taking over random desktops in order to type naughty URLs into open browser windows. Thankfully I ran Linux, and was immune to his mucking about.
Yeah, but only briefly. I ran the website on the Ping Of Death (after reading about it on bugtraq and realising it was going to need one). It was an "educational" week or two. During testing I dropped a machine in California from London with a single packet...
From memory the Linux kernel team had a patch within about eight hours of it going public., although there was a router macnufacturer who had one out within four, so they got the kudos.
The article's title says it all, really. How any serious OS developer could still be building an IP stack so wobbly that it is vulnerable to a "ping of death" in the 21st century is quite alarming. It seems that the only time Windows ever had a stable IP stack was back in the days when they were simply running a pirated copy of the BSD stack.
The entire operating system needs to be retired. Not just the old version, but all Windows everywhere. It is a cancer upon computing and must be eradicated.
Hahaha! OMG I missed using ping of death tool!
My main reason for using the ping of death tool was when playing the original quake game you could see other peoples ip address who were connected to the hosted game server.
I would play and make note of anyone who cheated then promptly run POD tool and would blue screen their pc thus forcing them to reboot. I hated it when they patched it back then.
I used to use such exploits to defend my IRC channel from those pesky Russian kids back in the day. "Ping of Death" didn't work for very long, much like OOB "nukes" (the winsock 2 update eliminated those) but there were still other packet fragmentation attacks like "Land" and "Bonk/Boink" and "Smurf" (if you knew what you were doing... as a last resort) that worked. I had a program that could generate those (and custom) attacks on a Windows machine by virtualizing its own TCP/IP stack (Windows lacked any raw socket functionality for spoofing packets) and hooking into your modem directly using the i/o port. (e.g. 02F8) It was funny that you could take down just about anyone with a few packets on a dialup connection.
I had a precoded attack for unpatched (Linux 2.0.something or earlier) Linux kernels too, called "Nestea" that was also similarly a fragmentation attack (kernel oops on trying to assemble offset packet fragments if I recall)
It's funny that Microsoft got something like that wrong again :-)
"A few ICMPv6 packets with router advertisements requests can cause a denial-of-service vulnerability reminiscent of the famous "Ping of Death". It’s a good illustration of how much we still do not know about the stability of IPv6. We continue to recommend turning off IPv6 on workstations if your network is not engineered for its use".
It's not a problem with the stability of IPv6 but with bugs in the Windows IPv6 stack ...
"A denial of service vulnerability exists in the Windows TCP/IP stack that could cause the target system to stop responding until restarted. The vulnerability is caused when the TCP/IP stack does not properly allocate memory for incoming ICMPv6 packets."
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