Basically, the attack is pretty simple to carry out. If your target is using a Puma 6-powered home gateway, and you know their public IP address, you can kick them off the internet.

The flaw is "trivial" to exploit in the wild, and would effectively make a targeted box useless for the duration of the attack. It can be exploited remotely, and there is no way to mitigate it.

Puma 6 modems are pitched as gigabit broadband gateway. If the devices can be potentially choked and knocked out simply by receiving traffic that is a fraction of the bandwidth their owners are paying for.

The Puma 6 chipset is used in several ISP-branded cable modems, including some Xfinity boxes supplied by Comcast in the US and the latest Virgin Media hubs in the UK.

There is a class action lawsuit over the performance of cable modems with Intel's Puma 6 chipset as the Atom chip inside cannot really cope.