Denial of Service Attack

A denial of service attack (DoS) is considered to take place only when access to a computer or network resource is intentionally blocked as a result of malicious action taken by another user.

These attacks do not necessarily damage data directly or permanently (although they could), but they intentionally compromise the availability of the resources.

The purpose of a denial of service attack is to render a network inaccessible by generating a type or amount of network traffic that will crash the servers, overwhelm the routers, or otherwise prevent the networks devices from functioning properly. These forms of attacks can include e-mail bomb attacks, sending thousands of e-mails to a particular computer system until that system crash, the software required to carry out denial of service attacks in widely available on the internet.

Another commonly used denial of service attack is the Ping O’ Death. The Ping O’ Death can crash or reboot a computer by sending a ‘ping’ message of greater than 65,536 bytes the default size is 64 bytes. Router updates have nearly eliminated these problems.

Denial of service attacks could be very effective against an Internet based company, since they rely on on-line connectivity. These sorts of attacks could easily disrupt electronic commerce on-line mechanisms.

Meanwhile the distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) is a denial of service attack, in which a multitude of attackers performs denial of service attacks in a coordinated manner to one or more targets. DDoS attacks are a subset of denial of service attacks and there must be more than one source of attacking and also must be coordination between the attackers.
Denial of Service Attack