Denial-of-Service Attacks

There are always stories during the evening news and columns of information in newspapers about attacks on websites.

This seems to alarm a lot of people; so I thought I would take a moment and explain what the most common of these attacks are and how they effect you.

The most pervasive “attack” is called “Denial-of-Service”. This is where someone writes a little program that asks a website to do something over and over again, as such speed that it does not have time to respond to other legitimate requests.

We’ve all been there; in a restaurant waiting on our server to stop by, but he or she is too caught-up with another customer who is monopolizing the server’s time so they can’t respond to the other customers in their area.

This customer who is being the jerk is denying you of service.

This happens mostly to those online services offered by government agencies who have to open their web application up to the general public, so you see this a lot with the IRS, Medicare, things like that.

The entities executing such attacks are not looking to steal any of your information, they are just trying to make a political or social statement.

So if you see this in the news don’t be too overly alarmed.

There are some of these attacks done against free service email addresses and alike, those too are more a pest than a problem. I’ll discuss those in a later post.

For more information about denial-of-service attacks click the link below.

US-CERT Tip ST04-015 - Understanding Denial-of-Service Attacks