Denial of Service Attacks: Methods, Tools, Defenses

This chapter will provide some basic introduction to Denial of Service attacks (DoS attacks). We will start with explanation of DoS attacks and all of its variations. Later on, we will focus on a subclass of DoS attacks — the ones committed from outside of victim’s system. In order to give good overview of DoS attacks, we will start with some of obsolete types of attack and show how the attacks have evolved: from simple tools to complex distributed systems. At the end of this chapter, reader will be able to see some defenses and some more general advices on how to improve organization of network staff in order to minimize the damage done by this kind of attack.