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Denial of Service Attacks Essay

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Denial of Service Attacks

Definition: Denial of Service. A cracker attack that overloads a server to the point that it no longer responds or shuts down completely. To flood a network or individual server with huge amounts of data packets.

How it Works

In a typical connection, the user sends a message asking the server to authenticate it. The server returns the authentication approval to the user. The user acknowledges this approval and then is allowed onto the server. In a denial of service attack, the user sends several authentication requests to the server, filling it up. All requests have false return addresses, so the server can't find the user when it tries to send the authentication approval. The server waits, sometimes …show more content…

Sometimes it doesn't even matter what kind of operating system you use, and you cannot patch or fix the problem directly. The attacks on Yahoo and Amazon were large scale networking attacks, and demonstrate how nobody is safe against a very determined attacker. Network attacks include ICMP flood (ping flood) and ‘smurf’ which are outright floods of data to overwhelm the finite capacity of your connection, spoof unread/redirect a.k.a. ‘click’ which tricks your computer into thinking there is a network failure and voluntarily breaking the connection, and a whole new generation of distributed denial of service attacks (although these are seldom used against individuals).

III. SYN Attack

When a session is initiated between the TCP client and server in a network, a very small buffer space exists to handle the usually rapid "hand-shaking" exchange of messages that sets up the session. The session-establishing packets include a SYN field that identifies the sequence in the message exchange. An attacker can send a number of connection requests very rapidly and then fail to respond to the reply. This leaves the first packet in the buffer so that other, legitimate connection requests can't be accommodated. Although the packet in the buffer is dropped after a certain period of time without a reply, the effect of many of these bogus connection requests is to make it difficult for legitimate

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