What phenomenon is described by the Ping of Death?

• A. Fragmented packet when reassembled is larger than 65535 bytes
• B. Ping floods target with small pings
• C. Ping requests exceed maximum responses
• D. Ping packets are dropped due to invalid checksum

Answer: (A)

The phenomenon tested is about an ICMP Echo (ping) request that is crafted so its fragments, when reassembled, would form a datagram larger than the allowed IP size. The Ping of Death historically sent a ping that was broken into fragments, and when these fragments were put back together, the total length exceeded 65,535 bytes—the maximum size of an IP datagram. Some systems’ reassembly or buffer handling couldn't cope with that oversized reassembled packet, leading to crashes, reboots, or other instability. Modern systems and networks have patched these weaknesses, so this attack is largely mitigated today.

The other options describe different behaviors that aren’t about oversized reassembly: sending many small pings in quick succession to overwhelm a target is a ping flood; a concept like ping requests exceeding maximum responses isn’t a recognized standard issue; and dropping ping packets due to an invalid checksum points to integrity checks, not the fragmentation-based overflow used in the Ping of Death.