What Are DoS and DDoS Attacks in Technical Term | Free Antivirus

Sure you've read and heard about denial of service attacks many times, but do you know what they are? A priori, it seems like a very technical term, but this attack is very easy to understand. Besides, it is one of the most used by cybercriminals worldwide, so it is important to understand what it consists of.

A denial of service attack aims to disable the use of a system, an application, or a machine, to block the service for which it is intended. This attack can affect both the source that offers the information, such as an application or the transmission channel, as well as the computer network.

Web servers can resolve a certain number of requests or user connections simultaneously, in case of exceeding that number, the server begins to slow down or may even not offer a response to requests or directly block and disconnect from the net.

There are two techniques of this type of attack: denial of service or DoS (for its acronym in English Denial of Service) and distributed denial of service or DDoS (for its acronym in English Distributed Denial of Service). The difference between the two is the number of computers or IPs that carry out the attack.

In DoS attacks, a massive amount of requests to the service are generated from the same machine or IP address, thus consuming the resources offered by the service until a moment comes when it is not responsive and begins to reject requests, this is when the denial of service materializes.

In the case of DDoS attacks, requests or connections are made using a large number of computers or IP addresses. These requests are all made at the same time and to the same service under attack. A DDoS attack is more difficult to detect since the number of requests comes from different IP's and the administrator cannot block the IP that is making the requests, as is the case in the DoS attack.

The computers that carry out the DDoS attack are recruited through the infection of malware, thus becoming bots or zombies, capable of being controlled remotely by a cybercriminal. A set of bots, that is, computers infected by the same malware, form a botnet or also known as a zombie network. This network has a greater capacity to bring down servers than an attack by just one machine.

To check if our computer is infected by this type of malware and belongs to a zombie network, without our being aware, we can use the AntiBotnet service that will detect if our network belongs to a botnet.

Why Are These Attacks Carried Out and Who Do They Affect?

As we have seen, denial of service attacks is used to disable a service offered by a server, causing the system to crash taking advantage of its vulnerabilities. The objective of cybercriminals is to cause damage, both to the users who use the service, and to the administrator who offers it, disabling its functionality and causing losses, both financial and prestige.

So far, the largest denial of service attack in history occurred, on February 28, 2018, on a well-known collaborative project platform. Leaving the platform without operation for a total of 10 minutes, intermittently. This attack was carried out in a distributed way, that is, with a DDoS attack. Despite all the security available to the platform, it could not cope with the bombardment of 126.9 million packets or what is the same, about 1.35 terabits per second received. This attack was carried out through a botnet network using servers of various entities.

How to Avoid It?

As users, we must review the configuration of our routers and firewalls to detect invalid or false IP's, which come from possible attackers. Normally, our Internet Service Provider (ISP) ensures that our router is up to date with these settings.

On the other hand, the Organizations and companies that provide these services must protect both their network and their entire infrastructure to prevent these attacks from affecting the performance of their work and, as a consequence, their clients. If a company is affected by a denial of service (DoS) attack, it will lose the trust of its customers and they will rule out hiring its services.

Find the best free antivirus to combat DDoS attacks.

And you, did you know about these types of attacks? Please tell us if you have ever suffered the consequences of a denial of service.