A Denial of Service (DoS) attack aims to make a website or internet resource unavailable. It can be costly and illegal, with traditional methods involving flooding the target server with bogus requests. Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks use hijacked networks to flood targets. Unintentional DoS attacks can also occur from high traffic.
A Denial of Service (DoS) attack is an attempt to make a website or other Internet resource unavailable to users. Denial of service attacks can be very costly, as businesses lose money and customers for every hour they are unavailable; they are generally illegal and also violate the Internet Architecture Board’s fair use policy. The traditional denial of service attack is performed by flooding the target server with bogus requests, overloading it, and preventing it from handling legitimate traffic; other types of attacks include completely disrupting the network connection, crashing the server, or shutting down the service for a particular person or group.
Denial of Service attacks based on traffic overload are generally very easy to launch; the main requirement is a large amount of bandwidth. If the destination server is flooded with more data requests than it has bandwidth for, valid requests will not be able to get through, and the server owner may even be charged for excessive bandwidth usage. Variations on this include the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, which involves hijacking a large network of computers and programming them to flood the same target. This can be done using viruses, worms or other malware, which can be programmed to attack and take down a specific website.
You can also use various network tricks to launch a denial of service attack, such as sending a large packet in multiple parts; the target server will try to reconnect them and may crash with an error message. If the server’s operating system has an unpatched security hole, it could allow hackers to download server data before crashing it, which could endanger sensitive information such as credit card and social security numbers. A denial-of-service “attack” can also be unintentional; Websites like Slashdot, Digg, and Reddit often deliver huge amounts of traffic to small, relatively unknown websites, which can’t handle all the requests and shut down. This was originally known as “getting Slashdotted”, although other websites often cause this problem.
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