I have tested my internal firewall (Suse7.0 2.2.16) with Nessus 1.03. It reported a security hole that would make it possible to crash the machine using the teardrop attack.
Does anyone know what this teardrop is all about, and how to close this hole.
Wow. This is a Blast from the Past. teardrop, newtear, Nestea (ipfragment.c), sping, bonk, etc. are all a type of Denial of Service attack more commonly know as "Nukes". They exploit flaws in the vendor's TCP/IP stack usually causing either a kernel panic or an intense overload of system resources that either locks the machine up or makes a reboot necessary. These were immensely popular on IRC networks a few years back. They were also fixed almost immediately in the Linux kernel. Unless you are running a kernel that is ancient (which apparently you are not) there should be nothing to worry about. You might want to report this to the Nessus team. I could be wrong, but it seems to me their program is sending you a false positive. M