Distributed Denial of Service Attacks (DDoS)
What is a DDoS attack?
A DDoS attack is when multiple compromised systems send a lot of requests or traffic to a target (ex. server, website, or other network resource) and cause the target to become paralyzed.
ICMP Flood
Another common flood-type of attack that uses any number of ICMP echo requests, or pings, to overload the victim’s network. For each ping sent, a reciprocal one containing the same number of packets is supposed to be returned. The targeted system attempts to respond to the countless requests, eventually clogging its own network bandwidth.
Ping of Death
Is a method by which hackers send abnormal or inflated packets (by way of pinging) to freeze, destabilize or crash a targeted system or service. Memory overflow occurs when it tries to reconstruct oversized data packets. Not relegated to ping alone, attackers can use any IP datagram type to launch an attack, including ICMP, UDP, and TCP.
UDP Flood
A DDoS attack where an attacker overwhelms random ports on a target host. When the target tries large amounts of such requests to match the intended application, resources are used and a denial of service on the victim machine occurs.
DNS Amplification
This type of DDoS attack occurs when an attacker spoofs or fakes its IP address of the machine they are trying to attack. Typically, the attacker does this many time with multiple machines the they control (ex. botnet).
DNS Flood
Similar to a UDP flood but instead the hacker targets the DNS server and “floods” it with seemingly legitimate traffic to impede server resources and its ability to direct other legitimate requests.
HTTP Flood
A type of DDoS attack in which the attacker uses HTTP requests to target an application or web server with seemingly legitimate traffic. Such requests can be specially crafted by the attacker to avoid detection on a network to reach their intended targets.
Smurf Attack
This type of DDoS attack is where the attacker will spoof an IP address to the IP of the server they are targeting and then send requests to be broadcasted to all network hosts on a network.
