DOS Attacks

When it comes to fighting any method of attack, it is always imperative for information’s security professionals to first understand the attack at hand.  If you don’t know how it works, you can’t stop it, fight it, or most importantly, prevent it.

The above error message”Network Timeout” was given when users tried to request for Twitter page. This article is about Twitter and Facebook which were affected by DOS attacks. These kinds of attacks are not new and can be recovered but then there should be some way to keep the websites secure.  

Basically DoS/DDoS attacks only purpose is to saturate the target servers/machines with pings/communications requests repeatedly and so quickly that the machine has no resources left.  Thus its intended processes and services cannot be completed, and usually result in its respective ‘timing out’.  There are all sorts of ‘types’ of DoS/DDoS attacks (ICMP flooding, p2p attacks, teardop attacking, nukes, distro attacks, etc) but the main theory and processes are the same.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10304633-36.html

Reference: http://ocw.mit.edu/NR/rdonlyres/Electrical-Engineering-and-Computer-Science/6-829Computer-NetworksFall2002/7C9AFDED-F5A3-406F-A685-09E5FD1B9F0B/0/L7Security.pdf