Browsing: NETWORK HACKS
Posted By Talha SAfi
11:00 am
If you are working in the field of
computer networks or an enthusiast in the field of network security, you
are sure to have come across the term “Denial of Service attack”
which is simply referred to as “DoS attack”. Today, this is one of the
most common types of network attacks carried out on the Internet. In
this post, I will try to explain DoS attack, its variants and methods
involved to carry out the same in an easily understandable manner.
What is a DOS Attack?
Denial of Service or DoS attack is a
type of network attack designed to flood the target network or machine
with a large amount of useless traffic so as to overload it and
eventually bring it down to its knees. The main intention behind DoS
attack is to make the services running on the target machine (such as a
website) temporarily unavailable to its intended users. DoS attacks are
usually carried out on web servers that host vital services such as
banking, e-commerce or credit card processing.
A common variant of DOS attack known as DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service)
attack has become quite popular in the recent days as it is more
powerful and hard to detect. A typical DoS attack has a single place of
origin while a DDoS attack originates from multiple IP addresses
distributed across two or more different network. The working of a DDoS
attack is shown in the following diagram:
Unlike a DoS attack where the attacker
uses one single computer or a network to attack the target, a DDoS the
attack originates from different pre-compromised computers belonging to
different networks. As the attacker uses a number of computer systems
from different networks each residing in different geographical
locations, the incoming traffic looks natural and therefore becomes hard
to detect.
Protection Against DoS/DDoS Attacks:
DoS attacks can easily be handled by
blacklisting the target IP (or range of IPs) that are found to be making
too many requests/connections (in an unnatural way) to the server.
However, DDoS attacks are complicated as the incoming requests seem more
natural and distributed. In this case it is hard to find the difference
between the genuine and malicious traffic. Taking an action at the
firewall level to blacklist suspected IPs may result in false positives
and therefore may affect the genuine traffic as well.
Methods Involved in DoS Attack:
The following are some of the commonly employed methods in carrying out a DoS attack:
- SYN Flood Attack
- Ping Flood Attack (Ping of Death)
- Teardrop Attack
- Peer-to-Peer Attacks
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