Denial of service attacks (DoS) - Essay Example

Additionally, DoS attack is sometimes called distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack). This sort of attacks (denial of service attack) may target users in an attempt to stop them from creating links on the network. However these connections may include outgoing transmission. In addition, a DoS attack may also target a whole corporation. In this scenario, it can stop incoming traffic or to prevent outgoing traffic towards network related applications. In this way this attack tries best to stop the victim from being usage of network links.

Moreover, denial of service attack is straightforward in accomplishment as compared to gaining managerial access to a specific system from distant location. That’s why DoS attack gains popularity on the Internet (Chan et al., 2010) and (Tech-FAQ, 2011). DoS attacks can easily halt our computer machine or our network connection. However, it totally depends on the overall enterprise nature; it may efficiently disable our corporation network that may result in overall network failure. Thus it is true fact that some of the DoS attacks can easily be executed through inadequate possessions beside a huge sophisticated environment.

We can clarify this situation with an example of an attacker having old personal computer along with a deliberate modem (that might be internal or external). This slow modem may perhaps be capable to halt our personal computers machines, hardware and sophisticated networks in a short time. Therefore we categorize this sort of attack as an asymmetric attack. Moreover, it totally depends on the attacker that which type of standard technique he/she adopts for the attack. For instance, if the attacker is a skilled person then he will create more problems for the firm.

In this scenario, one of the major techniques that an attacker can use is about email messages which are known as spam. These phenomena will result in similar attack launching on our electronic mail account. In this situation, it does not matter that whether the e-mail account we are using is provided by our company or we got it from a complimentary service that is provided to us by Hotmail, Gmail or Yahoo. In this scenario, another important factor for attacking on our computer is that sometimes services like Hotmail, Gmail or Yahoo provide us a limited storage (specific quota) which restricts the quantity of information that we can store in our account according to organizational rules and regulations.

Hence storage space perhaps will be different at any certain time. In addition, this storage space will be consumed in a short amount of time as a result of sending a lot of large e-mail posts to the account; In this way an attacker can devour our storage space (specific quota), that prevents us from getting valid, useful or useful mails (TechTarget, 2007; Carnegie Mellon University , 2001; McDowell, 2009). Modes of attack A DoS attack can appear in different forms and varies in multiplicity of services.

However, we can discuss modes of attack in following terms: Attacks due to Buffer Overflow Buffer Overflow is one of the most common types of Denial of service attack. It works simply by sending extra traffic towards a network. A thing that is necessary to define here is that networks are basically sophisticated in nature.