A teardrop attack is a type of denial-of-service (DoS) attack (an attack that attempts to make a computer resource unavailable by flooding a network or server with requests and data.)

How does teardrop attack work?

A teardrop attack is a denial-of-service (DoS) attack that involves sending fragmented packets to a target machine. Since the machine receiving such packets cannot reassemble them due to a bug in TCP/IP fragmentation reassembly, the packets overlap one another, crashing the target network device.

Why is it called a teardrop attack?

So, as the name suggests, the buggy packets keep on accumulating at the victim's side like teardrops and ultimately it leads to the machine crash. However, modern networking devices can detect this discrepancy in a fragmented packet.