Ethical Security And Networking

Newspapers Internet magazines came with cover stories when Denial of service (DoS) attacks assaulted a number of large and very successful companies' websites last year. Those who claim to provide security tools were under attack. If Yahoo, Amazon, CNN and Microsoft feel victim to DoS attacks, can any site-owner feel safe?
In this article we'll try to make site owners understand the "In and Outs" of DoS andDDoS attack methods, vulnerabilities, and potential solutions to these problems. Webmasters are usually seen searching for solutions to new security threats and ways of patching-up before it is too late.

DoS:
In a Denial of Service (DoS) attack, the attacker sends a stream of requests to a service on the server machine in the hope of exhausting all resources like "memory" or consuming all processor capacity.
DoS Attacks Involve:
Jamming Networks
Flooding Service Ports
Misconfiguring Routers
Flooding Mail Servers

DDoS:
In Distributed DoS (DDoS) attack, a hacker installs an agent or daemon on numerous hosts. The hacker sends a command to the master, which resides in any of the many hosts. The master communicates with the agents residing in other servers to commence the attack. DDoS are harder to combat because blocking a single IP address or network will not stop them. The traffic can derive from hundred or even thousands of individual systems and sometimes the users are not even aware that their computers are part of the attack.
DDoS Attacks Involve:
FTP Bounce Attacks
Port Scanning Attack
Ping Flooding Attack
Smurf Attack
IP Fragmentation/Overlapping Fragment Attack
SNMP Attack
Send Mail Attack