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A Denial-Of-Service (DoS) is one of the most popular tools in the cybercriminal armory. To Understand how powerful it is and if you want to know the signs of a DoS Attack, read this article.
What is Denial-of-service (DoS) attack?
A Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack meant to shut down systems, devices, networks, servers, websites, and other IT services that make resources inaccessible to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host connected to the Internet. DoS attacks accomplish this by sending exorbitant messages which make flooding the target with traffic and asking the network or server to authenticate requests that have invalid return addresses and make it very difficult for legitimate users to access them. DoS attacks typically target high-profile web servers from all sectors such as Government, Banking, e-gaming, etc. all sizes mid/big enterprises and all locations. Attacks may arise as revenge, blackmail, or activism techniques. Mostly cybercriminals target the network layer and upto the application layer, so attacks are difficult to detect. Since they could easily get confused with legal traffic.
What is Distributed Denial-Of-Service (DDoS) attack?
(DDoS) attack is a type of DOS attack. From Denial-Of-Service attack, hackers created a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. In this attack attackers use multiple sources to attack a single machine or network that can force a network to crash. DDoS attacks use botnets for larger attacks. Because attackers attack from multiple sources, they are often the most difficult to detect and shut down. Which also makes it difficult to differentiate legitimate users.
The basic types of DoS attack include:-
Buffer Overflow:- The most common DoS attack. The concept is to send more traffic to a network address than its build to handle. Data transferred to a buffer outbalance the storage capacity, and then the data overflows into another buffer one the data was not intended to enter.
SYN flood:- A SYN flood attack could be a specific protocol attack. During this attack where an attacker compromises multiple packet and simultaneously floods the target with multiple SYN packets. The connection lines fill up and not available for any other requests and it goes down or its performance is reduced drastically.
Smurf Attack:- A smurf attack causes packet flood on the victim by exploiting/abusing ICMP protocol. Send broadcast packets to many hosts using a technique called spoofing the source IP address that belongs to the target machine that ping every computer on the targeted network, instead of just one specific machine. The target responds and flooded with those responses.
Ping of Death:- In this attacker sends a ping request that is more than (65,536 bytes). Which is a larger packet than the allowable size to disrupt a targeted machine. Causing a buffer overload that makes the target machine to crash or freeze.
There are dozens of different types of DoS attacks, it’s difficult to categorize them simply or definitively.
Signs of a DoS Attack
- Network:- Slow network performance when opening stored files on the network or accessing the website.
- Web site:- Inability to access any website or does not open and A particular site cannot be found.
- Email:- A higher than usual volume of spam emails.
Businesses can take the following preventative measures:
- Apply patches regularly.
- Hardening databases
- never expose databases to the Internet without enforcing strong access control.
- Enroll for a DoS protection service.
- Limit remote administration to a management network.
- Secure all endpoint connections.
- Install a firewall.
- Scan your network ports and services that open to the Internet repeatedly.
- Shut down the ports that you don’t need.
- Create a Disaster Recovery Plan to ensure the recovery of data in case of an attack.
CONCLUSION:- This article is all about DoS attack if you have any queries feel free to ask in the comment section.