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What Is A Denial-Of-Service Attack?: Buffer Overflow

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What Is A Denial-Of-Service Attack?: Buffer Overflow

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What is a denial-of-service attack?

A denial-of-service (DoS) attack is a type of cyber attack in which a malicious actor


aims to render a computer or other device unavailable to its intended users by interrupting the
device's normal functioning. DoS attacks typically function by overwhelming or flooding a
targeted machine with requests until normal traffic is unable to be processed, resulting in
denial-of-service to addition users. A DoS attack is characterized by using a single computer
to launch the attack.

DoS attacks typically fall in 2 categories:

Buffer overflow attacks


An attack type in which a memory buffer overflow can cause a machine to consume
all available hard disk space, memory, or CPU time. This form of exploit often results in
sluggish behavior, system crashes, or other deleterious server behaviors, resulting in denial-
of-service.
Flood attacks
By saturating a targeted server with an overwhelming amount of packets, a malicious
actor is able to oversaturate server capacity, resulting in denial-of-service. In order for most
DoS flood attacks to be successful, the malicious actor must have more available bandwidth
than the target.

What are some historically significant DoS attacks?


A few common historic DoS attacks include:
 Smurf attack - a previously exploited DoS attack in which a malicious actor utilizes
the broadcast address of vulnerable network by sending spoofed packets, resulting in
the flooding of a targeted IP address.
 Ping flood - this simple denial-of-service attack is based on overwhelming a target
with ICMP (ping) packets. By inundating a target with more pings than it is able to
respond to efficiently, denial-of-service can occur. This attack can also be used as a
DDoS attack.
 Ping of Death - often conflated with a ping flood attack, a ping of death attack
involves sending a malformed packet to a targeted machine, resulting in deleterious
behavior such as system crashes.

What is the difference between a


DDoS attack and a DOS attack?
The distinguishing difference between DDoS and DoS is the number of connections
utilized in the attack. Some DoS attacks, such as “low and slow” attacks like Slowloris,
derive their power in the simplicity and minimal requirements needed to them be effective.

DoS utilizes a single connection, while a DDoS attack utilizes many sources of attack traffic,
often in the form of a botnet. Generally speaking, many of the attacks are fundamentally
similar and can be attempted using one more many sources of malicious traffic. Learn how
Cloudflare's DDoS protection stops denial-of-service attacks.

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