Network Intrusion Detection, Third Edition

Appendix B. Denial of Service

In February 2000, denial-of-service attacks were the hot topic. With a network of more than 2,000 compromised systems, most of them via a DNS buffer overflow, attackers shut down major high-profile Internet sites such as CNN and eBay. Although the end of this chapter covers these attacks, they are the exception and not the rule for denial of service. In general, denial-of-service attacks groan on and on, doing little harm besides wasting people’s time and bandwidth and occasionally crashing a system. In the vast majority of these attacks, the source address is faked or “spoofed.” Please be very slow to phone the owners ...