A denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) or distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack) is an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users. Although the means to carry out, motives for, and targets of a DoS attack may vary, it generally consists of the concerted efforts of a person or people to prevent an Internet site or service from functioning efficiently or at all, temporarily or indefinitely. Perpetrators of DoS attacks typically target sites or services hosted on high-profile web servers such as banks, credit card payment gateways, and even root nameservers.
Types of Dos Attacks
There are two types of Dos attacks namely:
DoS– this type of attack is performed by a single host
Distributed DoS– this type of attack is performed by a number of compromised machines that all target the same victim. It floods the network with data packets.
Symptoms of DOS:
- Unusually slow network performance.
- Unavailability of a particular website.
- Inability to access any website.
- Dramatic increase in the number of spam emails received.
- Long term denial of access to the web or any internet services.
- Unavailability of a particular website.
How to avoid DoS..??
An organisation can adopt the following policy to protect itself against Denial of Service attacks:
- Attacks such as SYN flooding take advantage of bugs in the operating system.
- Installing security patches can help reduce the chances of such attacks.
- Intrusion detection system can also be used to identify and even stop illegal activities
- Firewalls can be used to stop simple DoS attacks by blocking all traffic coming from an attacker by identifying his IP.
- Routers can be configured via the Access Control List to limit access to the network and drop suspected illegal traffic.
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