A denial-of-service attack(DOS attack) is a threat that switches off a machine or network, thereby making it inaccessible to its users. It is carried out by flooding more and more traffic towards the target or sending information to it so as to trigger a crash. In both cases, the DoS attack is deprived of intended users like employees, members, or account holders of the service or resource they expected.
DoS attack does not result in any kind of theft or loss of crucial data, rather it cost the victim a huge chunk of money to stabilize and time.
Methods of DoS attacks:
- Flooding services/Crashing services— When your system is loaded with too much traffic that lead towards buffering and causing it to slow down then you system stop working. This is called a flood attack and its types are:
- ICMP flood – Leverages misconfigure network devices by sending spoofed packets which ping every system in spite of single machine on the targeted network. Afterward, this network is triggered to increase traffic. ICMP flood is also called as the ping of death or smurf attack.
- Buffer overflow attacks – This is the most common attack. The only motive of this attack is to send limitless traffic to a network. This may include ICMP or SYN flood in addition to others that are specifically designed to exploit bugs to certain networks.
- SYN flood – It sends a request to get connected to any server sans shaking hands and continues to do the same until all open ports are saturated leaving nothing behind no access for users.
- DDoS attack— Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack occurs when multiple systems orchestrate a synchronized DoS attack to a single target. The specialty of this attack is that the target is attacked from diverse locations at once rather than from one location.
There are myriad advantages that an attacker can get from DDoS:
- He can leverage the greater volume of the machine to execute a dangerous attack.
- The location of the attack is next to impossible because of the random distribution of attacking systems (often worldwide)
- It is difficult to shut down multiple machines than the single one.
- Identification of the original attacking party is very difficult, as they are disguised behind many systems
In this technological era, many security systems have been developed to fight against DoS attacks, however, there is no such security system to defend the unique characteristics of DDoS. Thus, it is regarded as an elevated threat and organizations have fear of being targeted by such kind of attack.
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