Ping
of death issue. This issue occurred due to a loophole that existed in the
IPv4 ping packets which were originally intended to be 56-64 bytes in size.
Some computers were not designed to handle packets that were bigger than this
size. The sender would therefore send packets that were over 65,535 bytes with
the aim of overwhelming the recipient. Upon receipt of this packet in the
target computer, a buffer overflow would occur which would ultimately lead to
a system crash and sometimes causing the implementation of harmful code.