5. Denial of Service

Question 1

What is denial of service attack?

Answer 1

A denial of service (DoS) is an action that prevents or impairs the authorized use of networks, systems, or applications by exhausting resources such as central processing units, bandwidth, and disk space.

Question 2

How is bandwidth attacked?

Answer 2

Exploit small bandwidth between ISP and target network. Router will drop packets if local network limit is reached. Thus a lot of legitimate packets will be dropped

Question 3

How are system resources attacked?

Answer 3

Aims at overloading (Syn flood) or crashing (Poison packet) the network handling software of the OS:

Question 4

How are application resources attacked?

Answer 4

• Attack on a specific application (such as Web server)
• Typically involves a number of valid requests, each of which consumes
  significant resources