A teardrop attack is a special kind of denial of service attack that involves sending malformed network packets to the target machine. Specifically, the packets contain mangled IP fragments with overlapping, oversized payloads. This can crash various operating systems because of a bug in their TCP/IP fragmentation re-assembly code. Windows 3.1x, Windows 95 and Windows NT operating systems, as well as versions of Linux prior to versions 2.0.32 and 2.1.63 are vulnerable to this attack.
