A ping of death is a type of attack on a computer system that involves sending a malformed or otherwise malicious ping to a computer. A correctly formed ping packet is typically 56 bytes in size, or 64 bytes when the Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) header is considered, and 84 bytes including Internet Protocol (IP) version 4 header. However, any IPv4 packet (including pings) may be as large as 65,535 bytes. Some computer systems were never designed to properly handle a ping packet larger than the maximum packet size because it violates the Internet Protocol. Like other large but well-formed packets, a ping of death is fragmented into groups of 8 octets before transmission. However, when the target computer reassembles the malformed packet, a buffer overflow can occur, causing a sy