Prior to addressing each of these listed recipes individually, we should address some of the underlying principles and understand how they relate to the DoS attacks that will be discussed in this chapter. The DoS attacks that we will discuss in the recipes that follow could all be categorized as buffer overflows, traffic-amplification attacks, or resource-consumption attacks. We will address the general principles associated with how each of these types of attacks works in this order.
Buffer overflows are a type of coding vulnerability that can result in the denial of service of an application, service, or the entire underlying operating system. Generally speaking, buffer overflows are capable of causing a denial of service because they can result in arbitrary data being loaded into unintended segments of memory. This can disrupt the flow of execution and result in a crash of the service or operating...
