Penetration Testing For Dummies

Chapter 6

Overwhelm and Disrupt (DoS/DDoS)

IN THIS CHAPTER

Disrupting normal operations

Sending a flood attack to a host

Digging into the details of DoS and DDoS

Exploring specific DoS attacks

The series of attacks I cover in this chapter revolves around overwhelming targets. In previous chapters, you learn how to use specific tools to knock on the front door (or try the back door) and see if you could gain access. In this chapter, I show you how to kick in the front door.

In these scenarios, the attacker is focused on literally overwhelming the target to cause it to either crash, not accept real connections for service, clog up the pipes, incapacitate the system by using up all its resources, and just plain disrupt everything to cause a denial of service. I talk specifically about Denial of Service (DoS) attacks, which are unfortunately common.

I also show you how attackers (and pen testers) handle the disruption of resources through attacks such as a DoS, DDoS (distributed form of a DoS), buffer overflow attacks, and more. I discuss what tools you use to identify both whether ...