About
Denial of Service (DoS) is a category of network attack that consumes available server resources , typically by flooding the server with requests; the server is then sluggish or unavailable for legitimate users 1.
Computers have limited resources, for example computation power or memory . When these are exhaused, the program can freeze or crash, making it unavailable. A DoS attack consists of various techniques these resources and make a server or a network unavailable to legitimate users, or at least make the server perform sluggishly.
Example
There are also Distributed Denial of Service (DDosS) attack in which a multitude of servers are used to exhaust the computing capacity of an attacked computer.
Types of DoS attack
DoS attacks are more of a category than a particular kind of attack; below is a non-exhaustive list of DoS attack types:
- bandwidth attack
- service request flood
- SYN flooding attack
- ICMP flood attack
- peer-to-peer attack
- permanent DoS attack
- application level flood attack
Anki
Links
References
MDN. “Denial of Service (DoS) attack”. Available at: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Denial_of_Service . (Accessed: ). ↩︎