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A Distributed Denial Of Service Attack And Defense Essay

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Understanding a Distributed Denial of Service Attack and Defense The big item in the news lately from a cyber security standpoint has been Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, their frequency and size being the two big sticking points for the media. The one thing that the media tends not to do is explain what a DDoS is, what attack vector was used, realistically all the information that leads to a clear picture of what really happened during the attack. With that this paper will explain the process from beginning to end of a DDoS attack in a way that is easy to understand and hopefully debunks a lot of the misconceptions about DDoS that have been posted in class discussion. To begin we must first understand what a Distributed Denial of Service attack is. A DDoS attack per Arbor Network is a n attempt to make an online service unavailable by overwhelming it with traffic from multiple resources (1). With that there are four common categories for the attack types, connection attacks, volumetric attacks, fragmentation attacks, and application attacks (“What Is a DDoS Attack” 1). Connection attacks are an attempt to use up all available connections to the infrastructure devices, to include but not limited to load-balancers and application servers (“What Is a DDoS Attack” 1). The attack is set up to use all the potential connections to stop everyone from being able to connect to a site or service by keeping all the connections open to the attacker’s bot army.

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