Viruses attack and spread. Spy ware, malware and crimeware do what they are meant to do. What's worse is something that never lets you or a system do anything; hang the network, crash the systems, or stop entire organizations. Such is a Denial of Service (DOS) attack. Read on.
Security professionals are in a never ending battle with threats. One of those threats or attacks that can literally defeat the mighty Internet and bring it down to its knees is something known as a Denial Of Service Attack.
The objective of the attacker here is to seek out the vulnerability in a system, a network or the operating system. He seeks to deny authorized users any access to specific information, a computer system or a network of such systems.This kind of attack denies any access of information or usage of computational resources through overloading the computing capacity of the system by consuming the entire bandwidth of the victim’s network and causing the system to slow-down or even crash.
One Important point that has to be borne in mind is that the intent of the attack is not break into any network, embezzle data or information – it is just to ensure that the victim’s network slows down (if that is an intent, of course) and to impede users access to informational or computing resources to harm productivity. Usually the most extreme attack would aim for system/network hanging since it could impair productivity over long periods of time.
Now, this sort of an attack is usually done using a single system. However, if an attacker wishes to use a full army of systems and unleash a “ war”, he would then think of using a DDOS (Distributed Denial Of Service) where the intent still remains the same (i.e. The victim’s informational or computing resources stalled).
A DDOS is achieved by employing a master system to affect other intermediate victims (normal computers or users like you and I) by infecting these “zombie” computers ( as the intermediate “Soldier” computers are called) with a program that helps unleash the war. In such an attack, instead of inundating the victim’s server with repeated requests from a single system, (a drain on the server’s resources), the victim’s resources will now be overwhelmed by having to deal with a profusion of requests from multiple attacking machines. This sort of an attack has been made famous in the media due to the examples of eBay, CNN, Amazon and Yahoo.
How to save yourself from a DOS or DDOS attack?
There are various ways you can prevent your network or system from being used in a DOS or DDOS attack. Here are a few:
- Ensure that you have updated all of your software available on your system, and even more importantly downloaded patches of your operating system as often as you can.
- Downloading and installing a good anti-virus ( an Internet security package) would be even better- and look for regular updates ( Set the automatic update option to automate this)
