The Concept Of Denial Of Service Attacks And How They Work

The Concept Of Denial Of Service Attacks And How They Work

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A Denial of Service attack is a type of cyber-attack to make some of the services unavailable to the user. Similarly, a Distributed Denial of Services attack is an attack committed by a number of sources. It is similar to many customers crowding near the entrance of a shop for a sale before the opening of the shop and not letting the workers enter and disrupting the schedule.

The Concept Of Denial Of Service Attacks And How They Work

The short term used for Denial of Service is DoS. The DoS attack is an attempt to make a user or an organization deprived of the services of a resource they would usually expect to have. It is an attempt to make a network resource or machine occupied or unavailable to its intended users.

Even if a DoS attack doesn’t normally result in security loss like stealing of information, it can cost the target company or person a great deal of time and money. In general, the loss of service is the failure of a specific network service like for example, email, to be accessible or the momentary loss of all network connectivity and services.

This kind of attack can also wipe out files and programming in affected computer systems. DoS attack in several instances forced web sites accessed by millions of users to terminate operation temporarily. Here are the common forms of DoS attacks:

• * Buffer Overflow Attacks – this is the most common form of DoS attack. In this kind of attack, the objective is to send more traffic to a URL or network address bigger than the expected data buffers designed by the programmers that a user might send.
• * SYN Attack – when a session is started between TCP client and server in a network, there exist a very small buffer space that normally handles the quick “handshaking” exchange of messages that sets up the session. The session-establishing packets contain a SYN field that recognizes the succession in the message exchange. An attacker can send a number of connection requests extremely fast and then fail to answer the reply. This leaves the first packet in the buffer so that other genuine connection requests can’t be accommodated.
• * Teardrop Attack
• * Smurf Attack
• * Viruses
• * Physical Infrastructure Attack