Denial-of-Service Attack

What Does Denial-of-Service Attack Mean?

A denial-of-service (DoS) is any type of attack where the attackers (hackers) attempt to prevent legitimate users from accessing the service. In a DoS attack, the attacker usually sends excessive messages asking the network or server to authenticate requests that have invalid return addresses. The network or server will not be able to find the return address of the attacker when sending the authentication approval, causing the server to wait before closing the connection. When the server closes the connection, the attacker sends more authentication messages with invalid return addresses. Hence, the process of authentication and server wait will begin again, keeping the network or server busy.

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Techopedia Explains Denial-of-Service Attack

A DoS attack can be done in a several ways. The basic types of DoS attack include:

  1. Flooding the network to prevent legitimate network traffic
  2. Disrupting the connections between two machines, thus preventing access to a service
  3. Preventing a particular individual from accessing a service.
  4. Disrupting a service to a specific system or individual
  5. Disrupting the state of information, such resetting of TCP sessions

Another variant of the DoS is the smurf attack. This involves emails with automatic responses. If someone emails hundreds of email messages with a fake return email address to hundreds of people in an organization with an autoresponder on in their email, the initial sent messages can become thousands sent to the fake email address. If that fake email address actually belongs to someone, this can overwhelm that person’s account.

DoS attacks can cause the following problems:

  1. Ineffective services
  2. Inaccessible services
  3. Interruption of network traffic
  4. Connection interference
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Margaret Rouse

Margaret Rouse is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical, business audience. Over the past twenty years her explanations have appeared on TechTarget websites and she's been cited as an authority in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine and Discovery Magazine.Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages. If you have a suggestion for a new definition or how to improve a technical explanation, please email Margaret or contact her…