http://news.softpedia.com/news/attacker ... 9297.shtml
According to the research team, if an attacker sends a ping to our FreeBSD box but creates a malicious packet with an SCTP header of a different size than 12 bytes, it offsets values inside the operating system's computations, causing a kernel panic, which resets the machine. This is a DoS (Denial of Service) attack and is often employed with other exploits to break into vulnerable machines.
Not sure about the rest of the kernel, but holy cow, that's a horrific lack of exception handling right there.