Social Networking Infrastructure Attacks

Publisher Summary This chapter provides an introduction to distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack highlighting denial-of-service (DoS) attack. A DoS attack is defined as an attack coming from one Internet Protocol (IP) address to monopolize a computer resource so intended users are unable to utilize the resources. DoS attacks typically attempt to consume computational resources, such as bandwidth, disk space, or processor time. A DDoS is nothing more than a more powerful version of a DoS. Instead of the attack originating from a single source, multiple sources are used to simultaneously launch the attack. Launching this type of attack bombards the target with requests, thus overloading the resource. Botnets are used to launch numerous types of attacks including DDoS, spamming, sniffing and keylogging, identity theft, ransom attacks, and extortion attacks. One of the botnets, GT bot is based on the popular IRC client known as mIRC and another bot, Agobot uses a modular source code that is coded in C++.