High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! A ping of death (abbreviated "POD") is a type of attack on a computer that involves sending a malformed or otherwise malicious ping to a computer. A ping is normally 32 bytes in size (or 84 bytes when the Internet Protocol header is considered); historically, many computer systems could not handle a ping packet larger than the maximum IPv4 packet size, which is 65,535 bytes. Sending a ping of this size could crash the target computer.