Denial Of Service Attack Essay

As the internet has evolved over the past several years, so has cybercrime. The development of the internet over the last 20 years has made cybercrime more of a threat than ever (Glenny). New, faster ways to commit these crimes and techniques to obtain confidentiality by these masterminds are forming, and it’s making the internet a very dangerous place. As these criminal geniuses get smarter, users become more vulnerable and threats become more common. Since the internet began to really gain popularity and become more and more relevant in our lives, “Web vulnerabilities increased from 4,644 in 2007 to 6,549 in 2014” (Statistics and Market Data on Cyber Crime).

When discussing the iPremier denial of service attack, there needs to be some background in order to fully understand the position the company was in at the time. Firstly, a denial of service attack is an attempt to make a piece of hardware like a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users. This attack is performed by sending out a flood of information packets that causes congestion within the networks resources, deducing them unavailable. Denial of service attacks are conducted with malicious attempt as displayed by the iPremier case. The iPremier company was founded in 1990s by two students in Seattle, Washington. The company specialized in selling web-based commerce, such as luxury products, rare merchandise, and vintage goods over the internet. iPremier’s competitive advantage was their flexible return policies which allowed the customer to thoroughly check out the product and make a decision to keep the product or return it. The majority of iPremier customers are high end and credit limits are not a problem, which also adds to the competitive advantage of utilizing their entire customer base. They were one of the few companies in the 90s that were successful in this business sector and by the end of the decade the company saw sales as high as $32 million and a profit of $2.1 million. Sales had increased by 50% during the last three years of the decade and they were in an upward trend. iPremier’s stock nearly tripled after the company’s initial public

Security in the age of internet has become a tremendously important issue to provide comfort not only for paranoid people but for many others who are naïve to believe that protection in digital era is essential to communication between millions of people that increasingly used as a tool for commerce.

Such information is collected through emails, financial records, instant messages and other forms including video calls and internet voice calls (Litman, 2000). Scammers and cyber criminals have however taken advantage of the internet to tap into people’s information illegally, stealing identities and using it to commit cyber felonies (Culnan, 2000).

Denial of Service (DoS) attacks are becoming increasingly common and serious issues when it comes to Cyber Security across many industries especially with ecommerce business. Therefore, companies need to have a recovery plan in first place to cover emergency communication, as well as mitigate and identify any attacks, in order to improve recovery time and limit downtime. （OpsCentre. 2013）

These attacks usually put a heavy load on the target by making regular requests very rapidly. It is hard to distinguish if a web server is stormed by thousands of clients, or if there is a DoS attack in progress. A simple way to force the problem of heavy load is to use a server farm together with a load balancer. This will help against small attacks, but not against a DDoS started from several hundred hosts. Furthermore, increasing the number of servers is rather expensive.

Businesses, Governments and academic institutions are becoming needy on the internet in their day to day undertakings. Similarly, consumers are increasing their use of e-commerce and online shopping more. This indicates increasing openings for hackers to intercept and disrupt activities.

Internet technology has bestowed upon society a new norm, one that brought about both social and economic benefits. Communication and informal relationships reached higher heights with persons connecting with distant and ‘long lost’ family and friends, through email and social media. Businesses themselves have also benefited from this technology. They saw their demographic expand overnight from local, to regional and international clientele. However in parallel to an increase in users using their fingers to communicate and do business online, so were Internet security threats on the rise. Internet users and governments face increased risks of being targets of cyber-attacks. The digital age have introduced a new type of criminal called, ‘cybercriminals’. A cybercriminal is a person or a group who focus on virtual theft of financial information, business espionage and accessing government information. The result of these activities has an open question: How are cybercriminals getting access to sensitive and private data? The answer is simple: Internet Security, lack of, unawareness and not following basic security protocols. Although companies are selling customers personal information to advertisers, internet users must be conscious of a website’s security when entering personal information online, because too many users fall victim to scams resulting in financial loss and identity theft. The significance of this research paper is educate

Having a strong web presence is not only important in today’s world, it is vital for survival in today’s super connected world. Companies, banks, agencies and private industries must be able to create an environment to interact with customers, government officials and other companies in order to thrive. Opening yourself up to anyone through the Internet often means opening your system up to the world. Today we are more connected than ever, and cyberspace is littered with a multitude of individuals, some with the intent to compromise network confidentiality, integrity and availability. Anyone with a computer and Internet

Denial of Service (DoS) is a type of a computer security threat that is designed to attack a network and cripple it by flooding the network with useless traffic. A Dos attack exploits vulnerabilities in a TCP/IP implementation or targets specific operating systems or even specific computer applications. A DoS attack aims at ensuring authorized users do not have access to system resources. Common DoS attacks include buffer overflow, ping of death, smurf attack, TCP SYN attack and Teardrop attack (Gollmann, 2012).

A denial of service attack on a network could take one of three possible forms (Razmov & Juels, 2000). A malicious party (the attacker) could cause the network not to transmit messages it should be sending in order to offer service to a subset or all of its clients. On the other end of the spectrum, the network could be caused to send messages, which it should not be sending. By far the most common form of DoS in today’s networks is causing excessive bogus traffic (a.k.a. flooding the network) in the direction of a particular server, which in the end will prevent legitimate users from getting the service they could otherwise be receiving from that server.

DDOS is a type of DOS attack where multiple compromised systems -- which are usually infected with a Trojan -- are used to target a single system causing a Denial of Service (DoS) attack. Victims of a DDoS attack consist of both the end targeted system and all systems maliciously used and controlled by the hacker in the distributed attack.

In last several years, Daniel of Service attack (DoS)/ Distributed Daniel of Service attack (DDoS) has become one of the most critical threats for internet security, though it’s easily accomplished by the intruders. Even, proven and practicable attacking software are also available on the Internet. To get rid of this attack, first of all we have to know its consequences.

Denial of Service attacks are characterized as an explicit attempt by a hacker so as to prevent a user from getting or using the desired resources. Examples of such an attack are:

Distributed denial of service (DDOS): A DDOS attack is when computer systems attack thing like the server, website or other network resource. The incoming messages/connection requested/ malformed packets then flood the systems making it slow down, crash or shutdown.