Avoiding DoS
DoS is a serious web application vulnerability that has the ability to disrupt the availability of services and applications. The goal of DoS is to shut down the target network, service, or application and make it inaccessible to users and administrators – however, ultimately, users are the primary target audience.
A much more sophisticated and disruptive version of a DoS attack is DDoS attack – using multiple attacker machines to attack a target host. DDoS attacks are often highly skilled and planned attacks that use botnets to unleash large volumes of unwanted traffic towards a target.
Important note
A botnet is a large cluster of compromised machines used to carry out malicious attacks unknown to the owners of those machines.
DDoS attacks have two very distinct classifications:
- Infrastructure-layer attacks
- Application-layer attacks
Let's take a quick look at what both of these classifications detail. While we won...