Distributed Denial of Service Attacks
Denial of Service (DoS) attacks are those that overload a sever by inundating it with requests. This can cause a computer to suffer from "buffer overflow" or even crash because the resources are being pushed beyond their architectural limits. By using a network of infected computers, otherwise called a "botnet," to magnify the effects by both increasing and distributing the requests between nodes, the execution time of the attack is decreased proportionally to the pool of cumulative computing power of the botnet. To better harden critical networks from dangerous attacks like these, whose scale is such that ever larger server systems can be ground to a halt, it is essential to understand the motivations of the individuals who would perform them as well as the mechanics of the attacks themselves. Read below for more.