Hacking: The Art of Exploitation, 2nd Edition

Denial of Service

One of the simplest forms of network attack is a Denial of Service (DoS) attack. Instead of trying to steal information, a DoS attack simply prevents access to a service or resource. There are two general forms of DoS attacks: those that crash services and those that flood services.

Denial of Service attacks that crash services are actually more similar to program exploits than network-based exploits. Often, these attacks are dependent on a poor implementation by a specific vendor. A buffer overflow exploit gone wrong will usually just crash the target program instead of directing the execution flow to the injected shellcode. If this program happens to be on a server, then no one else can access that server after it has crashed. ...