Sams Teach Yourself TCP/IP in 24 Hours, Fourth Edition

Denial-of-Service Attacks

A recent craze in Internet intrusion is the denial-of-service (DOS) attack. A DOS attack is almost impossible to stop once it starts, because it does not require the attacker to have any particular privileges on the system. The point of a DOS attack is to tie up the system with so many requests that system resources are all consumed and performance degrades. High-profile DOS attacks have been launched against websites of the U.S. government and those associated with major Internet search engines.

The most dangerous DOS attack is the so-called distributed DOS attack. In a distributed DOS attack, the attacker uses several remote computers to direct other remote computers into launching a coordinated attack. Sometimes hundreds ...