Have you ever heard of DOS attacks? If not, you should read this article. Today we will talk about what is a Denial of Service DOS attack and types of DOS attacks. Let’s find out by reading the article below.
What is a denial of service attack (DoS)?
Denial of service (DoS) attacks occur when legitimate users are unable to access information systems, devices, or other network resources due to the actions of malicious cyber threat actors. Affected services may include email, websites, online accounts (such as banking), or other services that rely on the affected computer or network. Denial of service conditions are achieved by flooding a target host or network with traffic until the target becomes unresponsive or simply crashes, thereby preventing legitimate users from accessing. DoS attacks can cost organizations time and money while leaving their resources and services inaccessible.
Types of Denial-of-Service (DoS) Attacks
There are three main types of DoS attacks:
1. Application layer Flood
In this type of attack, the attacker simply floods the service with requests from spoofed IP addresses in an attempt to slow down or crash the service, as shown in . This could take the form of millions or thousands of requests per second to a particularly resource-intensive service that exhausts resources until the service can no longer process requests.
2. Distributed denial of service attack (DDoS)
Distributed denial-of-service DDoS attacks typically involve many "zombie" machines (machines that have been previously compromised and taken over by the attacker). These "zombie" machines then flood the service with requests to disable it.
DDoS attacks are notoriously difficult to mitigate, which is why outsourcing web filtering to a third party is the recommended approach. We'll cover this later.
3. Unintentional denial of service attacks
Not all DoS attacks are malicious. The third type of attack is an "unintentional" denial of service attack. A classic example of accidental DDoS is called "The Slashdot Effect (opens new window)". Slashdot is an Internet news site where anyone can post news stories and link to other sites. If the linked story becomes popular, it could send millions of users to the site, overloading the site with requests. If the site is not built to handle this kind of load, the increased traffic can slow down or even crash the linked site. Reddit and "The Reddit Hug of Death (opens new window)" is another excellent example of unintentional DoS.
I hope this article will help you to learn what is a denial of service attack (DoS) & Types of Denial-of-Service (DoS) Attacks. If you think you or your business is experiencing a DoS or DDoS attack, it's important to contact the appropriate technical experts for assistance.
