Distributed Denial-of-Service Attack: A Malicious Hacker Attempt to Prevent Legitimate Users from Accessing Information or Services

Abstract

Denial of Service attack, is the one in which an attacker attempts to prevent legitimate users from accessing information or services. It is a malicious attempt by a single person or a group of people to cause the victim, site, or node to deny service to its customers. Flooding a network with information is the common form of DoS attack. When you type a URL for a particular website into your browser, you are sending a request to that site's computer server to view the page. The server can only process a certain number of requests at once, so if an attacker overloads the server with requests, it can't process your request. This is a "denial of service". The attack becomes more successful with an abundance of attack packets i.e. the attack takes place simultaneously from multiple points. This type of attack is called a Distributed DoS, or DDoS attack.