Denial of Service (DoS) Attacks
Distributed Denial of Service Attacks Can Crash Any Site
Denial of Service (DoS) and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are two of the worst things that can happen to a site. Everybody has heard about various hacker exploits but those webmasters, who have had the pleasure to be the target of such an attack know how unpleasant it feels when one is helpless against the wave of requests hackers are sending to his or her site.
Denial of Service (DoS) and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are some of the oldest forms of hacking but this doesn't mean that, despite all advances in technology, a webmaster has the power to protect his or her site against such attacks. Even huge sites with lots of resources, for instance Twitter are not immune against the joint efforts of millions of hackers from all over the world.
What Is a Denial of Service Attack?
There are many definitions of Denial of Service attacks and one of the most concise, yet accurate is the definition of Kerio, which states that “DoS (Denial of Service) is a type of attack when too many concurrent requests overload the system; the server is no more able to respond to the requests of authorized users or fails. ” In other words, hackers generate so many requests to a server that the server inevitably crashes.
It doesn't matter how powerful the server is, how much bandwidth there is, etc. because if a single hacker doesn't succeed in bringing the server down, then many other hackers and even unsuspecting users are also involved into the attack and in this case the DoS attack is transformed into a Distributed Denial of Service Attack.
Denial of Service attacks can bring even the most powerful server and infrastructure down, as many large corporations already know by experience. DoS attacks can cause a lot of damage to the victim. There are some means to protect a site against most of the types of Denial of Service (DoS) attacks but still it is not possible to have reliable protection against Denial of Service attacks.
What Is a Distributed Denial of Service Attack
Distributed Denial of Service attacks are the worse, yet more popular form of a Denial of Service attack. Usually when a site becomes a target of a Denial of Service attack, it is actually a Distributed Denial of Service attack.
The main difference between an ordinary Denial of Service attack and a Distributed Denial of Service attacks is in the number of participants. In a Distributed Denial of Service attacks the numbers is considerable and very often the participants are totally unaware of what they are doing.
For instance, when a user's computer gets compromised by malware and hackers gain control over this computer, they can use it to orchestrate a Distributed Denial of Service attack without the knowledge and consent of the user, who owns the computer.
Denial of Service (DoS) and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are really dangerous and in some cases – i.e. when the target is a government system – they can rightfully be considered as a form of cyber terrorism. Yes, Denial of Service (DoS) and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are too serious to be taken lightly!
Denial of Service Attacks Block Equipment
|
What do you think about this article?
More in Technology
Latest Articles