What Is a Denial-of-Service (DoS) Attack?
A denial-of-service (DoS) attack is a cyberattack on devices, information systems, or other network resources that prevents legitimate users from accessing expected services and resources. This is usually accomplished by flooding the targeted host or network with traffic until the target can't respond or crashes. DoS attacks can last anywhere from a few hours to many months and can cost companies time and money while their resources and services are unavailable.
How Denial-of-Service Attacks Work
DoS attacks are on the rise as businesses and consumers use more digital platforms to communicate and transact with each other.
Cyberattacks are often launched to steal personally identifiable information (PII), causing considerable damage to companies’ financial pockets and reputations. Data breaches can target a specific company or a host of companies at the same time. A company with high-security protocols in place may be attacked by a member of its supply chain that has inadequate security measures. When multiple companies have been selected for an attack, the perpetrators can use a DoS approach.
In a DoS attack, the cyberattackers typically use one Internet connection and one device to send rapid and continuous requests to a target server to overload the server’s bandwidth. DoS attackers exploit a software vulnerability in the system and proceed to exhaust the RAM or CPU of the server.
The damage in loss of service a DoS attack does can be fixed in a short time by implementing a firewall with allow/deny rules. Because a DoS attack only has one IP address, the IP address can be easily fished out and denied further access using a firewall. However, there is a type of DoS attack that is not so easy to detect—a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Attack
A common type of DoS attack is the distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. The attacker floods its target with unwanted Internet traffic so that normal traffic is unable to reach its intended destination. Hordes of Infected, connected devices (e.g., smartphones, PCs, network servers, and Internet of Things devices) from around the world go after a targeted website, network, web application, application programming interface, or data center infrastructure simultaneously to block traffic.
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The various sources of attack traffic may operate in the form of a botnet. A botnet is a network of personal devices that have been compromised by cybercriminals without the knowledge of the devices’ owners.
The hackers infect the computers with malicious software to gain control of the system to send spam and fake requests to other devices and servers. A target server that falls victim to a DDoS attack will experience an overload due to the hundreds or thousands of phony traffic attacks that come into it.
Because the server is attacked from multiple sources, detecting all the addresses from these sources may prove difficult. Separating legitimate traffic from fake traffic may also prove impossible, hence another reason it is hard for a server to withstand a DDoS attack.
Why Are DDoS Attacks Launched?
Unlike most cyberattacks that are initiated to steal sensitive information, initial DDoS attacks are launched to make websites inaccessible to their users. However, some DDoS attacks serve as a facade for other malicious acts. When servers have been successfully knocked down, the culprits may go behind the scenes to dismantle the websites’ firewalls or weaken their security codes for future attack plans.
A DDoS attack can also function as a digital supply chain attack. If the cyberattackers cannot penetrate the security systems of their multiple target websites, they can find a weak link that is connected to all the targets and attack the link instead. When the link is compromised, the primary targets would automatically be indirectly affected as well.
Cyber vandals keep coming up with new ways to commit cybercrimes either for fun or profit. It is imperative that every device that has access to the Internet has security protocols in place to restrict access.
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DDoS Attack Example
In October 2016, a DDoS attack was carried out on a domain name system (DNS) provider, Dyn. Think of a DNS as an Internet directory that routes your request or traffic to the intended webpage.
A company like Dyn hosts and manages the domain names of select companies in this directory on its server. When Dyn’s server is compromised, this also affects the websites of the companies it hosts. The 2016 attack on Dyn flooded its servers with an overwhelming amount of Internet traffic, thereby creating a massive web outage and shutting down over 80 websites including major sites like Twitter, Amazon, Spotify, Airbnb, PayPal, and Netflix.
Some of the traffic was detected as coming from a botnet created with malicious software known as Mirai, which seemed to have affected more than 500,000 devices connected to the Internet. Unlike other botnets that capture private computers, this particular botnet gained control over easily accessible Internet of Things (IoT) devices such as DVRs, printers, and cameras. These weakly secured devices were then used to make a DDoS attack by sending an insurmountable number of requests to Dyn’s server.
Source: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/denial-service-attack-dos.asp