Denial of Service Attacks

Denial of Service Attacks

A denial of service (dos) attack is an attack that clogs up so much memory on the target system that it can not serve it's users, or it causes the target system to crash, reboot, or otherwise deny services to legitimate users.There are several different kinds of dos attacks as discussed below:

1) Ping Of Death :- The ping of death attack sends oversized ICMP datagrams (encapsulated in IP packets) to the victim.The Ping command makes use of the ICMP echo request and echo reply messages and it's commonly used to determine whether the remote host is alive. In a ping of death attack, however, ping causes the remote system to hang, reboot or crash. To do so the attacker uses, the ping command in conjuction with -l argument (used to specify the size of the packet sent) to ping the target system that exceeds the maximum bytes allowed by TCP/IP (65,536).

example:- c:/>ping -l 65540 hostname

Fortunately, nearly all operating systems these days are not vulnerable to the ping of death attack.

2) Teardrop Attack :- Whenever data is sent over the internet, it is broken into fragments at the source system and reassembled at the destination system. For example you need to send 3,000 bytes of data from one system to another. Rather than sending the entire chunk in asingle packet, the data is broken down into smaller packets as given below:

* packet 1 will carry bytes 1-1000.

* packet 2 will carry bytes 1001-2000.

* packet 3 will carry bytes 2001-3000.

In teardrop attack, however, the data packets sent to the target computer contais bytes that overlaps with each other.

(bytes 1-1500) (bytes 1001-2000) (bytes 1500-2500)

When the target system receives such a series of packets, it can not reassemble the data and therefore will crash, hang, or reboot.