Denial-of-Service

What is denial of service?

A denial-of-service (DoS) attack is one where the adversary makes a system unavailable to users who need it. This unavailability could refer to data being inaccessible or the web application simply being too slow or refusing to load. This attack can be made through browser redirection, closing connections, destruction of data, and resource exhaustion. There are a lot of vectors, and bad actors are getting more and more creative by the day.

Types of DoS attacks

There are two main types of DoS attacks, each using several methods to disrupt a computer or network resource. Simply put, we either overload the application, rendering it useless, or we directly cause such harm to its inner structure that it simply cannot work. Let’s look at this in detail.

Flooding attacks

These attacks involve overwhelming the target with traffic or requests, causing the system to crash or become unresponsive. This can be done using a single device (a DoS attack) or multiple devices (a distributed denial-of-service or DDoS attack).