DoS (Denial of Service) is an attack meant to shut down a machine or network, making it inaccessible to its intended users. DoS attacks accomplish this by flooding the target with traffic or sending it information that triggers a crash. In both instances, the DoS attack deprives legitimate users (i.e. employees, members, or account holders) of the service or resource they expected.

A denial-of-service attack uses only a small number of attacking systems (possibly just one) to overload the target.

Purpose of the denial-of-service attack:

DoS attacks often target web servers of high-profile organizations such as banking, commerce, and media companies, or government and trade organizations. Though DoS attacks do not typically result in the theft or loss of significant information or other assets, they can cost the victim a great deal of time and money to handle.

How does a DoS attack work?

This can be done through a number of techniques, including:

• SYN flood – SYN flood attacks send a large number of SYN (synchronize) packets to a target server, overwhelming its resources and causing it to crash or become unresponsive. In general, this is the most common attack due to the simplicity of its implementation.
• Buffer overflow attacks: The attacker overloads a network address by sending more data to a program than it can handle. This makes the machine consume all available hard disk space, memory, or CPU and overwrites adjacent memory locations that contain important information. This can result in a crash of the program.
• ICMP flooding: An ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol) flood attack is used to take configured or misconfigured network devices and use them to send spoof packets (known as pings) to ping every computer within the target network.
• Teardrop Dos: During a teardrop DoS attack, an attacker sends IP data packet fragments to a network in a way that the system cannot reassemble them properly. The network then tries to reassemble the packets, but it becomes confused and overwhelmed, leading to system crashes, freezes, or even a complete shutdown.
• HTTP flood- Attackers target web servers by overwhelming them with a large number of HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) requests.
• UDP DDoS – overwhelm random ports on the targeted host with a large number of UDP (User Datagram Protocol) packets. The receiving host checks for applications associated with these packets—finding none—sends back a “Destination Unreachable” packet. As more and more UDP packets are received and answered, the system becomes overwhelmed and unresponsive to another client.

• Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack:

An additional type of DoS attack is the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack.

Hackers or cyber criminals employ this attack using multiple compromised devices, known as a botnet, to overwhelm a target system with a large volume of traffic. This makes the network resource or host machine unavailable to its intended users on the Internet. The site becomes slow to a crawl or even crash so legitimate traffic won’t be able to reach the site.

Denial of service attack prevention:

The purpose of DoS / DDoS attacks is to block the ability of the service to adequately and timely respond to requests from real, legitimate customers, up to the complete inability to work with the service, thus resulting in significant downtime, lost productivity, revenue, reputational damage, and financial losses.

It is crucial to have robust cybersecurity solutions in place to prevent these attacks and protect against their damaging effects. By implementing the NetworkFort Solution, organizations can significantly reduce the risk of being targeted by DoS attacks.

Whenever it detects any inappropriate device connection or any unusual behavior, it immediately gives off alerts to signal that a device has been compromised. NetworkFort is able to identify even a minor data breach, device misconfiguration, policy violation, and anomalies in traditional behavior in data flow.

Thus, contact us and keep your system safe from any type of attack.