A denial of service attack is a computer attack with the aim of making a service unavailable, preventing legitimate users of a service from using it. At present, the overwhelming majority of these attacks exist from several sources, and are referred to as Distributed Denial of Service attacks (DDoS attacks).

This will be caused by: flooding a network ip to prevent it from functioning; disrupting connections between two machines, preventing access to a particular service; obstructing access to a service for a particular person; also sending billions of bytes to an internet box. The denial of service attack can block a file server, make it impossible to access a web server or prevent the arrangement of emails in a company. The attacker does not necessarily need sophisticated hardware.

Thus, some DoS attacks are executed with limited resources against a larger, more modern network. This kind of attack is sometimes called an “asymmetric attack” because of the difference in resources between the protagonists. Denial of service attacks have changed over the weeks (see history). At first, the first ones were perpetrated by a single “attacker”; quickly, more advanced attacks arrived, involving a multitude of “soldiers”. These are known as DDoS (distributed denial of service attacks).

Some hackers have specialised in “raising” armies of “zombies”, which they can then hire out to other malicious individuals or groups to attack a particular target. With the sharp increase in the number of commercial exchanges on Google, the amount of denial of service blackmail has increased dramatically.

With the exponential growth in the volume of items on the web, distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are becoming more common.

Thumbnail A DDoS attack aims to make a server, service or infrastructure unavailable.

The attack can take different forms: a saturation of the server’s bandwidth to make it unreachable, a depletion of the device’s system resources, thus preventing it from responding to legitimate traffic.

Using a botnet or “zombie network” to launch the DDoS attack

In order to send an extremely large number of requests to the targeted resource, the cybercriminal often establishes a “botnet” of infected computers.

If the cybercriminal controls the actions of each infected computer in the zombie network, the scale of the attack can overwhelm the victim’s web resources. Nature of current DDoS pitfalls In the early 2000s, this kind of criminal activity was well known. However, the amount of DDoS attacks is decreasing.