DoS
Attacks
A third form of network attack is known as denial of
service, where the attacker seeks to prevent legitimate use of a service or
system. Oftentimes, this is accomplished by overwhelming an infrastructure with
bogus requests for service. DoS attacks can also be caused by corrupted data or
configurations. For instance, a DoS attack could be the result of an
intentionally corrupted Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routing configuration. If
an attacker changed the network advertisement, authentication attributes, or
Autonomous System Number (ASN) parameters on an organization's routing
equipment, that organization could simply disappear from the Internet or, worse
yet, traffic destined to that organization could be routed to an illegitimate
remote location on the Internet.
DoS attacks can also be dispersed so that numerous
compromised machines launch a DoS attack simultaneously on the same target
service or host. Known as a Distributed Denial of Service (DDos) attack, such
events are extremely difficult to combat since it is often impossible to
ascertain the difference between legitimate and illegitimate traffic.
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