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 ICMP header is considered, and 84 bytes including Internet Protocol 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 documented in RFC 791. 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 system crash and pote