ISPs and Denial-of-Service Attacks

Abstract

Abstract A denial of service (DOS) attack is any malicious attempt to deprive legitimate customers of their ability to access services, such as a Web server. DOS attacks fall into two broad categories: • Server vulnerability DOS attacks — attacks that exploit known bugs in operating systems and servers. These attacks typically will use the bugs to crash programs that users routinely rely upon, thereby depriving those users of their normal access to the services provided by those programs. Examples of vulnerable systems include all operating systems, such as Windows NT or Linux, and various Internet-based services such as DNS, Microsoft's IIS Servers, Web servers, etc. All of these programs, which have important and useful purposes, also have bugs that hackers exploit to bring them down or hack into them. This kind of DOS attack usually comes from a single location and searches for a known vulnerability in one of the programs it is targeting. Once it finds such a program, the DOS attack will attempt to cra...