Microsoft Patches 1990s-Era 'Ping of Death' 128
CWmike writes "Microsoft on Tuesday issued 13 security updates that patched 22 vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer, Windows, Office and other software, including one that harked back two decades to something dubbed 'Ping of Death.' While other patched vulnerabilities we more serious, one marked 'CVE-2011-1871' brought back memories for nCircle's Andrew Storms. 'This looks like the Ping of Death from the early-to-mid 1990s,' he said. 'Then, when a specially-crafted ping request was sent to a host, it caused the Windows PC to blue screen, and then reboot.' Two decades ago, the Ping of Death (YouTube video demonstration) was used to bring down Windows PCs remotely, often as a way to show the instability of the operating system."
umm (Score:1, Informative)
better late then never!
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*than.
Otherwise, true that.
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Does anyone know if Back Oriface works on Win 7?
- Dan.
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If your friend was on dialup why not just do the ++ATH0 ping? Oh the fun I had with that.
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NO CARRIER
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That was actually one of the early patent problems. Hayes wanted a significant royalty to implement the guard timer.
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That won't ever work [wikipedia.org] unless your friend was using some brain damaged modem.
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Re:I remember the ping of death (Score:5, Interesting)
I remember a few variations.
One, of course, was ping -f from a sufficiently fast pipe (or just an equally-slow pipe with better buffer management). I had a custom REXX script under OS/2 which took a username as input, and would finger each of the terminal servers of a local ISP, derive the IP address of that user, then issue a ping -f for that particular dialup user.
It would cause their PPP sessions to timeout, at which point they'd disconnect. And it was fun, because I actually knew the people who I was disconnecting.
Tougher (or farther) targets at other hosts would get a ping -f from a blistering-fast (hah!) shared FreeBSD machine with a T1 connection. If -f didn't do it alone, increasing the packet size always did. Sometimes, it seemed that different packet sizes (not just larger ones) would make it happen sooner.
Around the same time, it was discovered (not by me) that sending an ICMP ping packet containing "+++ATH0" would instantly disconnect any user with a cheap modem by very neatly instructing their modem to do exactly that.
This worked because Hayes (rest their souls) had a patent on requiring a one second delay between +++ (aka "enter command mode") and any subsequent commands (ATH0 hangs up the modem). Makers of cheap modems wanted to pay as few royalties as possible, and they got their wish.
On most premium modems, or most old modems, it wasn't a problem, since it was required to have a delay between "+++" and any other command. But during the early winmodem days, it was a blast: Those cheap modems instantly dropped to command mode, and immediately executed anything after that.
You tell it to hang up, and that's just what it does.
It wasn't even really necessary to use ATH0, either: any old AT command would work, and would leave the modem in command mode instead of data mode. +++ATLM2L3, for instance, would result in a lot of noise from the modem speaker until their session timed out...
The ATH0 trick could be accomplished with IRCII using /ctcp [target] PING +++ATH0 or more generally with ping -p 2B2B2B41544829 [target IP or hostname] from a suitable *nix host.
It was fun being a kid back then, with OS-agnostic ways to be annoying. (I've grown up just slightly since then...)
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My favorite of them all ... /topic #l33t Press Alt + F4 for Ops.
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I've never seen someping so delightfully evil.
Sir Greybeard, I am humbled before your greatness! (Score:2)
Had I only known......;-)
The pure, unadulterated anarchy, and beautiful chaos of this mentality(in regards to the AT commands) is absolutely stunning and awesome.
Really. (no sarcasm intended)
*apply sarcasm/maybe offtopic, also
Thanks to you, I now have the proper incentive to continue research and development on on my iTIME Traveler® software for your iPhone! (soon coming to an APP Store near you!)
Depending on various IP lawsuits, my be also soon ported to Android and Win 7 mobile, or none of the
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Pingflooding dialup users was like shooting ducks in a barrel.
Personally, I loved messing with my friends by echoing TTY control codes into their (heh) world-writable dev/tty file. If you wanted to be a dick, you could just pipe a binary file into it, which basically made their session unusable, but it was much more fun to change their font or temporarily blank their screen.
Xwindows games were fun, too. Very little security back in the day meant you could play audio files to come out of their speakers (alwa
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Pingflooding dialup users when you, yourself, were on dialup was not always the most trivial thing in the world: Theoretically, I only had a 28.8 or 33.6 upstream, and they the same. It should not have worked at all, but it did at least for Linux and Windows [Trumpet Winsock] users.
I had other OS/2 using friends, back then, and we couldn't really touch eachother...whether with the same ISP, or a different one: Things would get very slow, but not fail. (I did not have the tools or knowledge to sort out t
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>>But X, with sound? Dude: It's half-past 2011, and audio with X are still completely different entities, with sound being a complete crapshoot. I don't want to doubt you, so I'll just ask: How did you make that work? Have I missed something in the past 16 years?
This was in a workstation lab, where people are all sshd into a unix host. You do a who, see what host they're on, then you ssh into their individual host, and then xaudio by default will play things right out of their speakers. To launch xwin
Re:I remember the ping of death (Score:5, Informative)
It really didn't do much unless your bombing your buddies dialup server, and thus tying up your dialup line. I guess it could be slightly annoying if you could get a shit ton of people to do it today.
I don't know what you are talking about, but it certainly isn't the ping of death. Maybe ping flooding? I personally wrote the patch for a now long defunct unix variant which fixed the actual "Ping of Death" vulnerability.
The way it worked was to send a ping with a 65536 byte payload - technically out of spec for the ICMP protocol by about 30 bytes in length. Since it was out of spec, most IP stacks were written with the assumption that it could never happen. But when it did happen, you got a buffer overflow that would usually panic the OS immediately. At the time, almost every OS on the net was vulnerable even the guys who didn't have BSD-derived stacks like MS Windows.
So all it took was one single oversized-sized icmp ping to crash just about any computer on the net. Imagine being able to take down all of google's internet presence with just a few thousand packets. Of course, at the time, there was no google.
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So all it took was one single oversized-sized icmp ping to crash just about any computer on the net. Imagine being able to take down all of google's internet presence with just a few thousand packets. Of course, at the time, there was no google.
Technically, you needn't send the whole thing. You couldn't send the whole thing, anyways, as there are limits on the size of an IP packet. You sent the packet in IP fragments. You needn't even send all of the fragments. Merely sending the last fragment, the one that overflowed the IP packet size.
Also, IIRC, it wasn't 65536. It was bigger. Maximal size was ~65506+your MTU (which was never less than 536, and was often 1500) which caused the overflow. 65536 total size is still okay (or is it 65535?)
Shachar
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Technically, you needn't send the whole thing. You couldn't send the whole thing, anyways, as there are limits on the size of an IP packet. You sent the packet in IP fragments. You needn't even send all of the fragments. Merely sending the last fragment, the one that overflowed the IP packet size.
Yeah, it was really just convenience to use ping since anyone could run it and most OSes would happily do the illegal fragmentation for you.
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The main difference being that when the Ping 'o Death became public knowledge, patches were available for all the free OSes... I read about it on BUGTRAQ, tested it against random Linux boxes in my office, then had every public-facing system patched and re-tested before lunch (which, those days, was about 50 minutes after I made it to the office).
The POD was one of the first incidents wher
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The Ping of Death had nothing to do with bandwidth flooding, it was a packet that would instantly just crash Windows as is quite clearly mentioned in the summary. It wouldn't matter if you were on a 14.4 modem, or a 1gbps pipe. It'd still crash vulnerable versions of Windows straight away.
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clearly in the summary that also states "something called the ping of death" what they are calling the ping of death isnt the ping of death on the other side of the country, and it didnt have much to do with bandwidth flooding it was about dumping so much shit into their system at once it would crack and possibly give you an entry vector, but it was worthless a decade ago cause post 486 days you had enough horsepower to just chew through it
POD has long since been patched. (Score:5, Informative)
Just FYI, the POD doesn't affect any modern OSes. It used to bring down Windows NT (and earlier), early linux kernels, as well as Mac OS 7 back in the day.
Re:POD has long since been patched. (Score:4, Informative)
You're forgetting about the part where Microsoft wrote a *BRAND NEW* TCP stack for Vista+. This is why these old bugs keep popping up in the news. Yes, it was patched -- but that was when they were using the forked BSD stack.
You got marked troll, and it's deserved. But better that someone else explain - MS never used a BSD stack. They licensed the Spider Systems STREAMS stack which was a wholly separate implementation (for one, it was STREAMS which BSD, AFAIK has never implemented).
However, my understanding is that MS did eventually roll their own stack, iirc it was for XP.
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You got marked troll, and it's deserved. But better that someone else explain - MS never used a BSD stack. They licensed the Spider Systems STREAMS stack which was a wholly separate implementation (for one, it was STREAMS which BSD, AFAIK has never implemented).
Those of us who are old enough remember the "portions copyright the regents of the University of California Berkeley" (or words to that effect) that used to be part of the Windows legal declarations from 95 onward. It has been considered common knowledge that their pre-Vista TCP/IP stack was taken from BSD [wikipedia.org], as was their FTP executable [terminally...herent.com]. If you're going to claim otherwise, you should offer some citations please.
However, my understanding is that MS did eventually roll their own stack, iirc it was for XP.
Nope, the "from the ground up" rewrite was for Vista [slashdot.org], although they had previously partially rewrit
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It has been considered common knowledge that their pre-Vista TCP/IP stack was taken from BSD, as was their FTP executable. If you're going to claim otherwise, you should offer some citations please.
Like lots of common knowledge, it was https://www.kuro5hin.org/?op=displaystory;sid=2001/6/19/05641/7357 [slashdot.org]">wrong and you'll see that the wikipedia page you linked to does not cite its sources for those claims. While it may be true that Vista has a complete network stack rewrite, that does not mean there wasn't an earlier rewrite when Spider was dumped.
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Stupid typo!
https://www.kuro5hin.org/?op=displaystory;sid=2001/6/19/05641/7357 [kuro5hin.org]
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No amount of fixing a post referring to a Kuro7hin page is going to remove the stupid.
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Did you notice this line in the (corrected) article you linked to?
"Now, some of Spider's code (possibly all of it) was based on the TCP/IP stack in the BSD flavors of Unix."
Re:POD has long since been patched. (Score:4, Interesting)
I am (or was, its been 15 years) actually pretty familiar with Spider's code and it wasn't even close to to the BSD stack.
They probably lifted constants and structures inherent to TCP/IP and might have cut-n-pasted a few code snippets like checksum calculations, maybe even some higher-level stuff to emulate sockets on top of the STREAMS Transport Layer Interface. But the heart and soul of the BSD stack is the mbuf structure and that didn't exist at all anywhere in the Spider code. Not just a simple search-and-replace with a different data structure, it was an entirely different data flow because STREAMS had requirements that couldn't just be "bolted on" to the BSD stack.
Totally sucked for me because everything I knew about BSD network internals was useless there - and everything I learned about Spider's code while on that job became practically useless the second I moved on as Sun's own STREAMS implementation in Solaris, which was basically the only mainstream use of STREAMS, had nothing to do with Spider.
Re:POD has long since been patched. (Score:4, Interesting)
Those of us who are old enough remember the "portions copyright the regents of the University of California Berkeley" (or words to that effect) that used to be part of the Windows legal declarations from 95 onward. It has been considered common knowledge that their pre-Vista TCP/IP stack was taken from BSD [wikipedia.org], as was their FTP executable [terminally...herent.com]
The "common knowledge" here is an euphemism for myth. Back in Windows NT 3.1 (!) MS licensed a TCP/IP stack from Spider. That *may* have been based partially or entirely on the BSD stack of the time. However, as of Windows NT 3.5 and Windows 95 that stack had been replaced by Microsofts own stack. Some of the utilities (ftp client, ping?) were still the original BSD utilities, or based on them. The network stack has not been BSD since Windows NT 3.1.
If you're going to claim otherwise, you should offer some citations please.
here you go: https://www.kuro5hin.org/?op=displaystory;sid=2001/6/19/05641/7357 [kuro5hin.org]
Nope, the "from the ground up" rewrite was for Vista [slashdot.org], although they had previously partially rewritten the stack for Win 2K and for XP I believe.
Incorrect, it had been previously rewritten for Windows NT 3.5. See above.
But if you were paying attention back during the interminable Vista beta process, you would've remembered the noise about those old TCP/IP vulnerabilities, solved long ago, that Microsoft re-introduced with their new stack.
Citation? or should I write
If you're going to claim otherwise, you should offer some citations please"
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Nope, the "from the ground up" rewrite was for Vista, although they had previously partially rewritten the stack for Win 2K and for XP I believe. And there were definitely a number of bugs in that new Vista stack - here's one example.
In fact, during the Vista betas, it was revealed that the "new" stack was indeed vulnerable to a whole laundry list of vulns fixed in the XP stack... Not only P-o-D, but also land.c and other antique exploits would work without modification when executed against Vista. This proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that Microsoft was not doing any bounds checking in the TCP stack. IOW, they were making the same amateur-hour mistakes they made the FIRST time around all over again for their new version of Windows.
O
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You don't recall correctly. You were right about the first bit, he was right about the second.
MS did not use the BSD stack, however their new TCP stack was invented for Vista.
Its got a long ass way to go to mature. Its sad that they didn't revert that one change for Windows 7.
From what I understand its supposed to allow more functionality eventually. I can't really see what sort of functionality you need out of a tcp stack that wasn't already there. Anything else can be bolted on top.
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I can't really see what sort of functionality you need out of a tcp stack that wasn't already there.
Deep packet inspection and silent (hidden) report-to-base capabilities.
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From what I understand its supposed to allow more functionality eventually. I can't really see what sort of functionality you need out of a tcp stack that wasn't already there. Anything else can be bolted on top.
Have you ever used the IPv6 "bolted on top" of the XP/2003 TCP/IP stack? The Vista implementation is much better. Guess why.
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I can't really see what sort of functionality you need out of a tcp stack that wasn't already there. Anything else can be bolted on top.
From Windows Internals, Fifth Edition (Mark E. Russinovich; David A. Solomon; Alex Ionescu):
The Next Generation TCP/IP Stack offers several advanced features to improve network performance, some of which are outlined in the following list:
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FWIW all of those things are part of a good modern stack and technically not more functionality. I too struggled to figure out what might qualify as "more functionality," the only things I could think of would be support for new protocols or "replacement" implementations - like an app could pass a function pointer to the stack and say "for my connections, use this code to do the tcp processing instead of what came with the kernel" or possibly define an entirely new protocol that could be application defin
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There were three stacks used in Windows.
Windows 3.x didn't come with a stack, you had to supply your own (Trumpet Winsock, anyone?).
Windows 95, though, featured it's own brand new stack, BSD based.
Then WinSock 2 came out, and that one dumped the BSD based stack for their own. (WinSock 2 featured changable stacks with a new internal API which made it incompatible with the old stack). This stack was under development for a while - Windows 95 shipped with a BSD stack purely because of release date issues.
Then
Re:Patch = turn off ping support? (Score:4, Informative)
Since Windows XP SP2 I think it was the firewall is turned on by default(or at least really really encourages you to do so) and blocks ping responses and was released August 25, 2004.
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When I was in college I once witnessed it put to good use. I was over in a friend's dorm room. It was 2 am and the asshole above him was playing Quake with the volume at 11. It was a well known secret at the time that the network admins kept a "hidden", but world-readable list on the unix server of every IP address in the school, including who it belonged to, what room, and what wall port. So my friend grepped the list for the room number above him, guessed which wall port, and then POD nuked the IP address
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From TFA:
Storms said it appeared that today's "Ping of Death" bug was a different vulnerability than Microsoft patched in its now-ancient OSes of the 1990s.
"it appeared"?
The bug affects the QoS service on Vista and newer OSes - a service which wasn't available in 1990 on windows.
XP and machines without URL-based QoS enabled are unaffected.
Also from TFAdvisory: [microsoft.com]
By default, the URL-based Quality of Service feature is not enabled on any Windows operating system.
In other words: no big deal.
And it's a "ping of de
Didnt bluescreen (Score:2)
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Depends which windows. At least one of the NTs definately would bluescreen.
I actually had this on a function key on my mIRC client, so that if someone was trolling the IRC channel, I'd highlight their name, hit F10 (or something) and it'd kick them, ban them, then win-nuke them. More malicious types would just drop a bot into a channel and nuke everyone in there. God damn the dial-up days where wild sometimes.
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Re:Didnt bluescreen (Score:4, Interesting)
God damn the dial-up days where wild sometimes.
Fugganaye right. I shouldn't admit any of this, but I was into scrolling chat rooms* back in the mid-late 90s and it was the fucking Wild West. Winnukes and Portfloods for days and days. Javascript exploits and whatnot. People getting pWn3d for no good reason. You had to be patched and armed just to stay in the joint.
There was a guy that flexed his hax0r muscle at everyone, but especially gave me shit. Seriously unprovoked bullshit, following me from room to room, then later site to site. I could write a book on this, but basically through some elaborate social engineering of several people (including his school) I was able to determine his home address. I bribed a high school friend of mine who was going to a school in the next city over to go take a picture "of the white house at this address" and send it to me. Some low-tech scanning practices and some floppy disk work at a local Staples ensued.
The next time he fucked with me I posted the pic of his house in the chat room. I wish I had logged his responses, and the crying he did to my alt (the social engineering 'chick') over the next few days. He never messed with me or anyone else in the place again. It was a pretty good hack, and I dreamed guys like Kevin Poulsen would approve. But I actually felt pretty dirty afterwards.
*hotelchat ftw!
Re:Didnt bluescreen (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, the wild west days, I remember hanging around on IRC on #userfriendly where much of the crowd were of the IT types working in the .com boom which was very wild west itself. One night one of the regulars posted a message that she was on dial up and was being ping flooded by some guy with a cable modem, and asked someone ping flood the guy off the net so she could upload an important file before it was due in a few minutes. Well the moments afterward were one of those things where you look back and think, hey maybe too many people decided to unleash too much fire power at once. Sure there were those that were sitting on T1, T3, etc. lines at the time that reacted to the call within seconds, but there were also a few BIG GUNS aimed at this lowly cable modem user's IP within seconds. Think core routers from big name national ISP's, and .COM giants. When the smoke cleared a minute or two later everyone realized not only was the cable modem user in question off the net, but so was his cable provider.
Holy Nuke It From Orbit, Batman! (Score:2)
Wow!
What a revelation for me.
I say this as a former n00b-troll.
I will say that this 'lesson gave to me' in my ms- spent[sic] [1]youth had a profound positive influence on my internet behavior, except when i 'drink while posting' here on /., sad to say.
Again, wow.
Thanks very much, BTW, really.
[1] Some habits are hard to break. ;-)
As my wife has said about me many times, "At least he's house-broke, but he's not domesticated. But, I've never shopped at 'Normal-Boys-R-Us'. Ever!"
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I was there for that, "borrowing" my school's connection.
And yes, I used this nick in the channel.
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Not only can you not ignore the collateral damage, people should also have asked themselves if the alleged flooder had actually done anything at all. People regularly ask for help with retaliating when they're actually just looking for someone else to carry out their (first-strike) attack for them. Attacks under the guise of "active defense" are a very old tactic - Poland certainly won't forget.
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The thing is, most of those knew NOTHING about TCP/IP, so my standard reply when people asked for my IP addy was to reply with 127.0.0.1 (and yes, that worked for PoD vs Windows...)
In school, we used it to knock the Quake players offline, so people could do their homework etc on the school computers.
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Well, some jokers tucked away behind some terminal deep in one of the buildings decided to have some fun and sent repeated PODs to each kiosk (which did cause a blue-screen, BTW) on election day. I
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It took me an entire week of being 'nuked' several times a day to figure out Win95 was being less stable than usual.
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His ISP used static hostnames, so I knocked together a script that scanned for him to be on line and ping flooded him. I had cable internet, (Early adopter) so if was easy to just flo
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I had Win95 at the time, and it did bluescreen.
Ah, the memories. I remember being naive, and searching frantically around the intertubes looking for a "how to" document explaining how to employ the "Ping Of Death" that I just recently read about.
My search took me to IRC, where--true to n00b form--I proceeded to ask a very dumb question:
DZ> Can someone show me how to do the ping of death?
Someone> Like this...
[blue screen]
My girlfriend was right next to me and thought it was the funniest thing. I did
Misleading title (Score:2)
The bug exists in Windows Vista, Server 2008, Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2, Microsoft said, but not in Windows XP or Server 2003.
Re:Misleading title (Score:4, Insightful)
It would make more sense if you provided context for your quote
Storms said it appeared that today's "Ping of Death" bug was a different vulnerability than Microsoft patched in its now-ancient OSes of the 1990s.
The bug exists in Windows Vista, Server 2008, Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2, Microsoft said, but not in Windows XP or Server 2003.
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Re:Misleading title (Score:5, Insightful)
That is stupid. Any IP host should respond to a ping. It's one way of testing if everything is working. Disabling ping just because your IP stack is buggy is security through obscurity. ICMP has to be implemented according to standard.
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Would it kill you to have the Windows machine initiate the ping to a server instead of replying to it? Would it kill you to just transfer a file from one machine to another if you want to see if everything is working?
Making a Windows machine ignore ping requests will not make it impossible to test a network connection, Mr. "+5 Insightful for calling somebody stupid". What it will do is make it slightly harder for unwanted attackers to know there is a computer there. Security through obscurity might not be t
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You're missing the point. ICMP has to be implemented in order for your IP stack to work. Whether you drop, reject or accept certain ICMP packets is irrelevant, if your IP connection wants to work, it has to process them. If there is a bug in how you process ICMP packets it won't matter whether or not you reply to them or not.
And most recent tools don't rely on ping anymore as Windows Firewall does drop all ICMP packets. Even nmap has had the option of testing a host without ping for as far as I can remember
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You have obviously never worked with technical support for an ISP. Oh how I hate that almost no Windows-machines respond to ping, because all firewalls, including the one built into Windows disables ICMP by default. I love Mac:s and (the occasional) Linux machine you run into, because they do respond, making troubleshooting a whole lot easier.
I think that every machine should respond to ping, it's just silly not to.
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None of these script kiddies are going o get my IP (Score:3)
at 127.0.0.1 they'll find out it's armored beyond anything they can come up with
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Patents (Score:1)
At first, I read that as Microsoft patents "Ping of Death". And it didn't surprise me.
Memories (Score:2)
Ping of Death == WinNuke? (Score:2)
There used to be a Macintosh Application called WIN-NUKE, and we'd use it to crash NT-based web-servers. I think this was during the days of NT3.5, and Macs were still running System 7.1 or something like that.
Anyhow, we were a Mac/Linux shop at the time, and during the dot-com boom, there was this dopey company called "muffinhead", we thought that was a dumb name, so we'd win-nuke them constantly.
We'd ping them from the linux box, see a continuous stream of replies, run win-nuke, and then... the pings woul
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I wonder if this is the same exploit used by the old Windows app "BitchSlap".
I remember entering the IP address of someone who annoyed me into it, then seeing them disappear from IRC.
Good times.
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There are actually a lot of "Windows Kiddies" on IRC. Not a majority by far, but still some. I was surprised that a libSDL channel I recently got into was almost all Windows folks.
By my estimation, in my experience (freenode and efnet), most people on IRC are running some form of older-school Linux distribution, such as Debian or Slackware. There are some Ubuntu peeps but I think a lot of them use something more 'modern', i.e. skype or pidgin. I see BSD folks in my BSD channels, but they only barely edg
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By my estimation, in my experience (freenode and efnet), most people on IRC are running some form of older-school Linux distribution, such as Debian or Slackware. There are some Ubuntu peeps but I think a lot of them use something more 'modern', i.e. skype or pidgin. I see BSD folks in my BSD channels, but they only barely edge out the Windows guys overall.
I'll go with that. I'm one of the few folks left who still uses IRC, and I used Slackware until very recently... I am afraid I have moved to the da
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I use the hyperbole as one of the "5 users left" on IRC, because since I started using IRC on DALnet in early 1995; I have watched the average peak online number of users counts grow well into 130,000+ users, and then in later years drop way back to 15,000. :-/
I can't help but mourn that IRC in many respects may be past its prime; i'm afraid networks will slowly erode , as soon as the current generation of IRC server admins retire, and ISPs can no longer be found that want to run IRC servers for free.
It's been a few days, but I hope you've come back to read this...
I've used the same "last 5 people on IRC" joke myself. IRC still exists, but I think you're right in that it's slowly dying. I first connected BitchX to efnet in 1998 (on my Caldera OpenLinux system!), and it was an insane, vibrant, dangerous and beautiful experience. I later moved over to freenode but there was still a very active community. I took a break, and have come back to it recently, and all the old channels are 'dead'. Even the
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When I used to host LAN parties after the DoS attacks became well publicized, we'd all start out playing the game nicely, be it Warcraft II or Quake or whatnot, but when someone would feel they were wronged (how one would be wronged in a game with fairly inflexible rules I still don't understand) or were doing far worse than everyone else, they'd quit and start attacking whoever they felt deserved it.
I started running Warcraft II under MS-DOS only, u
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[...] (how one would be wronged in a game with fairly inflexible rules I still don't understand) [...]
Well, there are a lot of games out there that have various flaws that can be exploited to your advantage which is generally considered to be something you don't do outside of a strictly competitive environment. Then there are "house rules" (one I remember fondly was playing various RTS games 2v2 on maps that had one or more rivers crossing the map with a stated rule that no one was allowed to cross the river within the first n minutes of the game, really cut down on the number of games that just turned into
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I used to run Quake and Doom on Linux for the same reason...