computer networking A computer network is a set of computers sharing resources located on or provided by network nodes. The computers use common communication protocols over digital interconnections to communicate with each other. These interconnections ar ...

, a mangled or invalid packet is a packet — especially IP packet — that either lacks order or self-coherence, or contains code aimed to confuse or disrupt computers, firewalls, routers, or any service present on the network. Their usage is associated with a type of network attack called a

denial-of-service In computing, a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) is a cyber-attack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host conn ...

(DoS) attack. They aim to destabilize the network and sometimes to reveal its available services – when network operators must restart the disabled ones. Mangled packets can be generated by dedicated software such as

nmap Nmap (Network Mapper) is a network scanner created by Gordon Lyon (also known by his pseudonym ''Fyodor Vaskovich''). Nmap is used to discover hosts and services on a computer network by sending packets and analyzing the responses. Nmap prov ...

. , most invalid packets are easily filtered by modern stateful firewalls.

References

Packets (information technology) {{Compu-network-stub