Denial of service attacks refers to the type of cyber-attacks where the attackers block legitimate users from accessing an internet or web service (Shruthi & Asha, 2018). It is meant to flood an online service such as the internet hence making it unavailable for its users. It is one of the most common attacks where the hacker spread malicious software to the vulnerable computers specifically through infected channels such as attachments and emails.

The denials of service attacks accomplish its mission by flooding the targeted computer with numerous traffics while also sending information that potentially generates a crash (Shruthi & Asha, 2018). In all the instances, denial of service attacks denies legitimate users such as employees as well as account holders in an organization an opportunity to access the resource as expected (Shruthi & Asha, 2018). The DoS attack operates by either flooding the system or causing the device to crash. The flood attacks occur when too much traffic against a network to the extent that it causes the system to buffer. And when the system buffer, it slows down and can eventually stop working. The DoS attacks that generally use the flooding attacks include

• Buffer overflow attacks

It works by sending more traffic against a network address as compared to the capacity that programmers have built it to handle.

• ICMP Floods

It sends spoofed packets that are meant to ping each targeted systems

• SYN flood

It works by sending a request to connect to the server. However, it does not complete the handshake since it continues until the open ports get saturated with requests (Shruthi & Asha, 2018). However, crashing services occur when the attackers exploit vulnerabilities that lead to the crashing of the target system. The Denial of service attacks relies on the input that is sent to take advantage of the target system hence causing it to massively destabilize or even crash to prevent the users from accessing it.

The perpetrators of the Denial of service attacks frequently target the web servers of multinational organizations such as media companies, banking institutions, government as well as trading organizations (Shruthi & Asha, 2018). It is important to realize that denial of service attacks do not lead to any loss or theft of information or any significant asset of an organization, but it causes the victims of massive loss of money and time. The distributed denial of service is also another type of DoS attack that happens when more than one system orchestrates a synchronized attack against one target. It launches assaults from more than one direction against one specific target hence causing a massive slowdown of the target system or even complete failure. The hackers who launch DoS attacks are always difficult to detect because they conceal their identities behind compromised systems. The examples of DoS attacks that have happened in the recent past include Melbourne IT, DreamHost and UK National lottery (Bisson, 2017).

References

Bisson, D. (2017). Five Notable DDoS Attacks. Retrieved on March 13, 2019, from https://www.tripwire.com/state-of-security/featured/5-notable-ddos-attacks-2017/

Shruthi, C., & Asha, M. (2018). Dos Attack and Suspicious Activity Detection for a Book Application.