The denial of service (DOS) attack is one of the most powerful attacks used by hackers to harm a company or organization. Don’t confuse a DOS attack with DOS, the disc operating system developed by Microsoft. This attack is one of most dangerous cyber attacks. It causes service outages and the loss of millions, depending on the duration of attack. In past few years, the use of the attack has increased due to the availability of free tools. This tool can be blocked easily by having a good firewall. But a widespread and clever DOS attack can bypass most of the restrictions. In this post, we will see more about the DOS attack, its variants, and the tools that are used to perform the attack. We will also see how to prevent this attack and how not to be the part of this attack.
What Is a Denial of Service Attack?
A DOS attack is an attempt to make a system or server unavailable for legitimate users and, finally, to take the service down. This is achieved by flooding the server’s request queue with fake requests. After this, server will not be able to handle the requests of legitimate users.
In general, there are two forms of the DOS attack. The first form is on that can crash a server. The second form of DOS attack only floods a service.
DDOS or Distributed Denial of Service Attack
This is the complicated but powerful version of DOS attack in which many attacking systems are involved. In DDOS attacks, many computers start performing DOS attacks on the same target server. As the DOS attack is distributed over large group of computers, it is known as a distributed denial of service attack.
To perform a DDOS attack, attackers use a zombie network, which is a group of infected computers on which the attacker has silently installed the DOS attacking tool. Whenever he wants to perform DDOS, he can use all the computers of ZOMBIE network to perform the attack.
In simple words, when a server system is being flooded from fake requests coming from multiple sources (potentially hundreds of thousands), it is known as a DDOS attack. In this case, blocking a single or few IP address does not work. The more members in the zombie network, more powerful the attack it. For creating the zombie network, hackers generally use a Trojan.
There are basically three types of DDOS attacks:
- Application-layer DDOS attack
- Protocol DOS attack
- Volume-based DDOS attack
Protocol DDOS attack: A protocol DDOS attacks is a DOS attack on the protocol level. This category includes Synflood, Ping of Death, and more.
Volume-based DDOS attack: This type of attack includes ICMP floods, UDP floods, and other kind of floods performed via spoofed packets.
There are many tools available for free that can be used to flood a server and perform an attack. A few tools also support a zombie network to perform DDOS attacks. For this post, we have compiled a few freely available DOS attacking tools.
Free DOS Attacking Tools
1. LOIC (Low Orbit Ion Canon)LOIC is one of the most popular DOS attacking tools freely available on the Internet. This tool was used by the popular hackers group Anonymous against many big companies’ networks last year. Anonymous has not only used the tool, but also requested Internet users to join their DDOS attack via IRC.
It can be used simply by a single user to perform a DOS attack on small servers. This tool is really easy to use, even for a beginner. This tool performs a DOS attack by sending UDP, TCP, or HTTP requests to the victim server. You only need to know the URL of IP address of the server and the tool will do the rest.
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