DoS Attack / Stress Testing

DoS attack stands for denial-of-service attack. It is also known as stress testing. It is a type of cyber attack which makes a website, machine or network resource unavailable.

DoS attack is accomplished by using flooding technique, while in a distributed denial-of-service attack, the traffic comes from many different sources. In this way DdoS attack is very difficult to stop.

In DDoS attack the perpetrators uses more than one unique IP address.

Types of DoS Attacks-

1. Amplified DNS (Domain Name System) denial-of-service attack.

2. Buffer overflow

3. PING-of-death attack down the Packet Inter-Network Groper (ping) protocol which may cause down the targeted system/server.

4. SYN flooding attack

5. Teardrop attack

US-CERT (Computer Emergency Readiness Team) suggest following points, which indicate the DoS attack-

1. Network may be down, especially when opening a file.

2. A perticular/any website is not accessible.

3. A bulk of spam emails.

Defence methods- There are many prevention and response tools are availble which are given below-

1. In application front end hardware analyzes data packets and identifies the nature of data packets.

2. Firewall is used to prevent simple DoS attack.

3. Intrusion prevention system (IPS) is used to identify the code block with bad intent.

4. DDS (DoS Defence System) based defence system data rate based attack such as SYN floods, ICMP floods and protocol attacks such as ping of death, teardrop.

When a white hat hacker used DoS attack to check vulnerability of system/server, then it is known as stress testing.

In the world of computer, stess testing is leagle, because it is used to find out the loop holes of system.