Hacking Exposed 7, 7th Edition

APPENDIX CDENIAL OF SERVICE (DOS) AND DISTRIBUTED DENIAL OF SERVICE (DDOS) ATTACKS

Since the beginning of the new millennium, denial of service (DoS) attacks have matured from mere annoyances to serious and high-profile threats to e-commerce. The DoS techniques of the late 1990s mostly involved exploiting operating system flaws related to vendor implementations of TCP/IP, the underlying communications protocol for the Internet. These exploits garnered cute names such as “ping of death,” Smurf, Fraggle, boink, and Teardrop, and they were effective at crashing individual machines with a simple sequence of packets until the underlying software vulnerabilities were largely patched.

During 2011 and 2012, the world was rudely awakened to just how devastating ...