CSCI 4541 Lecture 2: Denial-of-Service Attacks
8 Feb 2017
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Document Summary
The nist computer security incident handling guide defines a dos attack as: An action that prevents or impairs the authorized use of networks, systems, or applications by exhausting resources such as central processing units (cpu), memory, bandwidth, and disk space. A form of attack on the availability of some service. Categories of resources that could be attacked are: Relates to the capacity of the network links connecting a server to the internet. For most organizations, this is their connection to their internet. Aims to overload or crash the network handling software. Typically involves a number of valid requests, each of which consumes significant resources; thus limiting the ability of the server to respond to requests from other users. Aim of this attack is to overwhelm the capacity of the network connection to the target organization. Traffic can be handled by higher capacity links on the path, but packets are discarded as capacity increases.
