Distributed denial of service Attack

Distributed denial of service Attack: In a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, an attacker may use your computer to attack another computer. By taking advantage of security vulnerabilities or weaknesses, an attacker could take control of your computer. He or she could then force your computer to send huge amounts of data to a website or send spam to particular email addresses. The attack is “distributed” because the attacker is using multiple computers, including yours, to launch the denial-of-service attack.

A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is one in which a multitude of compromised systems attack a single target, thereby causing denial of service for users of the targeted system. The flood of incoming messages to the target system essentially forces it to shut down, thereby denying service to the system to legitimate users.

In a typical DDoS attack, the attack begins by exploiting vulnerability in one computer system and making it the DDoS master. The attack master, also known as the botmaster, identifies and identifies and infects other vulnerable systems with malware. Eventually, the assailant instructs the controlled machines to launch an attack against a specified target.

There are two types of DDoS attacks:

A network-centric attack which overloads a service by using up bandwidth and an application-layer attack which overloads a service or database with application calls. The inundation of packets to the target causes a denial of service. While the media tends to focus on the target of a DDoS attack as the victim, in reality there are many victims in a DDoS attack, the final target and as well the systems controlled by the intruder. Although the owners of co-opted computers are typically unaware that their computers have been compromised, they are nevertheless likely to suffer a degradation of service and not work well.

A computer under the control of an intruder is known as a zombie or bot. A group of co-opted computers is known as a botnet or a zombie army. Both Kaspersky Labs and Symantec have identified botnets are not spam, viruses and worms, as the biggest threat to Internet security.

A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) is a type of computer attack that uses a number of hosts to overwhelm a server, causing a website to experience a complete system crash. This type of denial-of-service attack is perpetrated by hackers to target large-scale, far-reaching and popular websites in an effort to disable them, either temporarily or permanently. This is often done by bombarding the targeted server with information requests, which disables the main system and prevents it from operating. This leaves the site’s users unable to access the targeted website.

DDoS differs from a denial-of-service (DOS) attack in that it uses several hosts to bombard a server, whereas in a DoS attack, a single host is used.