Before publishing the exploit, I imagine it would've been quite practical to flood an entire data center with malicious ICMP packages and just waiting for the next kernel patches that necessitate rebooting to come out. If you don't know that the ICMP packets flooding in aren't just weird background noise, you might ignore them when they're not causing problems.
If I send a load of ICMP at a datacenter, don't they just get dealt with at the firewall, not by individual servers? Like I can't ping a specific machine inside a datacenter, it just pings the datacenter itself
Depends on how the datacenter deals with ICMP. If you host dedicated machines on dedicated IP addresses, there's no need to deal with traffic rewriting and you can just use ICMP the normal way. If you apply NAT or weird filtering then you'll hit the firewall first of course.
