Categories of a DoS Attack - Math Problem Example

The internet is currently being used to provide support for infinite professional and personal needs for business organizations as well as individuals. Because the Internet provides excellent support for every kind of user at the same time as it also allows nasty people to use this wonderful tool for making negative use of extensively available resources and launch a variety of denial of service (DoS) attacks against several sources such as web sites, networks and web-based applications. A denial of service attack allows an attacker (a malicious user) to take advantage of the Internet connectivity or wireless devices to harm or destroy the services provided by a sufferer firm, frequently merely by flooding a target firm with lots of fake requests (Hussain, Heidemann and Papadopoulos; Wang, Lin and Li; Mohammed and Issac).

At present, there exist several categories of a DoS attack. In this scenario, a DoS attack can be either a multi-source attack in which several hosts bring together to overflow the target using a large number of attack packets or it can be a single-source attack in which only one host is used to attack the victim. An attack in which multiple hosts are used is known as a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. In addition, the internet provides a large number of stylish attack tools and applications that provide the attacker with the capability to automate the process of compromising hosts and carrying out different DoS attacks. There are a large number of websites that provide thorough guidelines and tutorials to facilitate even an amateur to make use of this material to effectively launch a DoS attack. Without a doubt, these security attacks create massive monetary losses for both business organizations and individuals every year, forcing researchers and governments to invent procedures to deal with these issues. Though, there are many applications and tools that can be used to effectively identify an attack and fundamental characteristics for instance packet types and traffic rates. However, for the reason that attackers can build most packet details themselves, classifying these attacks as multi-source or single-source and recognizing the number of attackers is still a challenge (Hussain, Heidemann and Papadopoulos; Wang, Lin and Li; Mohammed and Issac).

The basic purpose of this research is to present a detailed insight into the denial of service attacks. This paper presents a detailed analysis of denial of service attacks and mechanisms used by the attackers to launch such kinds of attacks. This paper will also discuss the security mechanism and strategies that can be adopted by business organizations to deal with these security threats. This paper also discusses some of the available rules and laws that address this issue. With the passage of time and the advancement of technology, denial of service attacks are turning out to be a well-organized form of security attack which are causing some serious problems to network links and servers connected to the Internet. The results of a survey revealed that more than 94% of the network operators are experiencing a minimum of one DoS attack every month, in addition, more than 8% of them are the target of approximately 600 attacks per month.