
In many cases, an application’s thresholds are much lower than the infrastructure that it runs on. Application-layer attacks: Applications communicating over the network need to be capable of processing the requests that they receive.
Protocol-level attacks attempt to consume all of a computer’s available connections, making it incapable of accepting new connections.
Protocol-level attacks: Computers have a set number of TCP and UDP port numbers allocated and cannot handle a new connection if no port is available. These attacks may be composed of a massive number of small packets or a smaller number of very large ones. Volumetric attacks attempt to overwhelm these systems by sending more data than they can handle. Volumetric attacks: Network connections and network interface cards (NICs) have set bandwidth limitations. Examples of common attack techniques include: Most DoS attacks are designed to exceed this maximum capacity, making it impossible for the system to process legitimate user requests.ĭoS attacks can be performed in multiple different ways. Every component of a system has a maximum amount of traffic, data, connections and so on that it is capable of processing, and the entire system is limited by the component with the lowest threshold. However, the most common method of performing a DoS attack is to take advantage of bottlenecks within a computing system.
Buffer overflow vulnerabilities and other programming flaws can be exploited to cause a segmentation fault or other error that causes a program to crash. The goal of the attack could be to hurt the target organization, extort a ransom to allow services to be restored or cover up another attack.ĭoS attacks can take advantage of a number of different vulnerabilities within a computer system.
A DoS attack is any attack that is designed to take a system offline or make it unavailable to legitimate users.