In what way can we protect against DOS attacks? What are the different ways? Also can we prevent such attacks? If yes, then how can we achieve it?
Denial of Service or DoS attacks are one of the most feared threats in nowadays cyber security scene. DoS attacks can initiate outages of web sites and network services for organizations either large or small. Any intentional attempt to cut off a website or network from its intended users is eligible as a DoS attack.
This kind of attacks has been effectively deployed against major online businesses like Twitter, WordPress, and Visa and MasterCard. DoS attacks successfully bang the services offline costing negative publicity and lost business. If there is a silver lining to DoS attacks, it is this: the idea behind a normal DoS attack is not to expose or steal classified data.
The majority of DoS attacks don’t breach the network of the company. They just overpower it with traffic. It’s like drowning the entire network with all possible traffic it can get until it dies in the process. DoS attacks can be successful against defenseless victims but with a small number of key limitations.
The victims of a DoS attack can block the initiating IP address either at the ISP level, to kill network-level floods or the firewall level, to kill HTTP requests. Enterprise products can recognize and block single source attacks as soon as they start. DoS and DDoS attacks have the same form of attack but they differ in the way the attack is initiated.
In a DoS attack, only one computer initiates the attack. But in a DDoS attack, multiple computers initiate the attack. A DoS attack can be easily prevented using the tools available on the market while a DDoS attack is very difficult or maybe impossible to prevent.
