What is a Denial of Service Attack?

By Denise | March 11, 2016

A Denial-of-Service (DoS) Attack Prevents Users from Accessing a Computer or Website.

What is a Denial of Service DoS Attack?In a denial-of-service (DoS) attack, a hacker attempts to overload or shut down a service so that legitimate users can no longer access it. Typical DoS attacks target web servers and aim to make websites unavailable. No data is stolen or compromised, but the interruption to the service can be costly for an organization. Business owners don’t want to incur any downtime because lost time equals lost money. Find out how much money downtime will cost your business by using our downtime calculator.

Types of Denial-of-Service Attacks

  •  Distributed Denial-of-Service Attack (DDoS) Attack – A DDoS attack involves sending more traffic to a computer than it can handle. The a hacker has a botnet flood a web server with requests. This is the simplest and most common type of DoS attack.
  • Smurf Attack – According to CISA, a Smurf Attack is when a cyber criminal sends Internet Control Message Protocol broadcast packets to hosts with a spoofed Internet Protocol (IP) address that belongs to the target computer. When these spoofed packets are received, the recipient will respond and the target host will be flooded with the responses.
  • SYN Flood – This is another common DoS attack method. A SYN flood happens when the attacker sends the target server a request to connect, but never completes it via a three-way-handshake. According to CISA, a three-way-handshake is a method used in to establish a connection in a Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)/IP network. Since this handshake can’t be completed, the connected port is left occupied and is not available for more connection requests. By continually sending requests, hackers can saturate all open ports so that the rightful users can’t connect.

Contact RMON Networks today and find out how we can keep your business safe!

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