Internet Denial of Service: Attack and Defense Mechanisms

Appendix A. Glossary

The following is a glossary of terms associated with DDoS.

• agent A malware program responsible for performing actions under control of a handler. In the context of DDoS, this would be the program that floods a victim. Other agents could be responsible for distributed sniffing, distributed file service, distributed password cracking, etc. An agent in a classic handler/agent network does not directly respond to user commands, instead having these commands relayed to it from a handler. IRC bots, on the other hand, do (in most cases) respond directly to commands from the attacker.

See also army, bot, botnet, handler.

• amplification Attacks that use amplification use some kind of request that will elicit a response that is ...