What
is denial of service attack?
Those organisations
that depend on the Internet and the web to do all or significant amount of
their business are highly vulnerable to attackers whose sole purpose is to
bring their systems to a halt or cause the performance of their systems to
degrade. Web-based systems rely on
numerous types of hardware and software for their functionality. Typically routers,
firewalls, proxy
servers, web
servers, and email servers are employed for electronic communication.
Denial of
service attack is to use certain types of computer programmes, residing on
remote computers to bombard one or a number of components of the system with
considerable amount of requests in order to affect the availability and efficiency
of the system. These attacks are invariably
launched from computers that are remote to both the attacker and the attacked
and one that is usually compromised through an associated security attack.
These attacks could be coordinated with a number of computers attacking
one resource or one computer attacking a number of resources.
The point
is that interconnected networks, and in particular infrastructure of web-based
systems is limited in terms of resources.
Examples of resources are bandwidth, processing power, and storage
capacity that are targeted through hacker attack. The types of organisations that would be highly
vulnerable are pure plays (Amazon, eBay, ..), and Internet service providers
(Freeserve, AOL, ..). Usually devices
that are attacked are those that regulate traffic on the corporate network.
For example Routers are responsible for routing the packets to the
destination. Bombardment of Routers with unreasonably high
number of requests will cause them to slow down, wrongly route the messages,
and crash.
To know
more see;