Denial of Service

In computing, a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) is a cyber-attack where the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host connected to the Internet. Denial of service is typically accomplished by flooding the targeted machine or resource with superfluous requests in an attempt to overload systems and prevent some or all legitimate requests from being fulfilled. A DoS attack is analogous to a group of people crowding the entry door or gate to a shop or business, and not letting legitimate parties enter into the shop or business, disrupting normal operations.

Criminal perpetrators of DoS attacks often target sites or services hosted on high-profile web servers such as banks or credit card payment gateways. Revenge, blackmail and activism can motivate these attacks.

Denial-of-service attacks are characterized by an explicit attempt by attackers to prevent legitimate users of a service from using that service. In a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, the incoming traffic flooding the victim originates from many different sources – potentially hundreds of thousands or more. This effectively makes it impossible to stop the attack simply by blocking a single IP address; plus, it is very difficult to distinguish legitimate user traffic from attack traffic when spread across so many points of origin. There are two general forms of DoS attacks: those that crash services and those that flood services. The most serious attacks are distributed. Many attacks involve forging of IP sender addresses (IP address spoofing) so that the location of the attacking machines cannot easily be identified and so that the attack cannot be easily defeated using ingress filtering.

Court testimony shows us the first demonstration of DoS attack was made by Khan C. Smith in 1997 during a Defcon event disrupting Internet access to the Las Vegas Strip for over an hour and the release of sample code during the event led to the online attack of Sprint, Earthlink, eTrade, and other major corporations in the year to follow.

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