> what is denial of service attack?
A Denial of Service attack (DoS or DOS) is any type of Internet attack that is
designed to prevent people from using your server(s). There are lots and lots of
types of DoS attacks.
A few years back, we were hit with a ping flood. They just sent tons of ping packets
to us. Since their "pipe" was bigger than ours, it used up all our bandwidth, and our
customers couldn't get through to our servers.
A SYN flood is another type of attack, where hackers send a handful of "half open"
connections that eat up the resources so people can't get through to a specific port
on a specific server.
Then, there's the simply "crash and burn" where a hacker will take advantage of a
known flaw that will crash the software on the server.
Finally, there's DDoS, or Distributed Denial of Service, where a hacker will hijack a
number of servers on the Internet (dozens or hundreds), and set up software to attack
a specific site at a specific time. That's typically used again larger sites, such as
Yahoo, that have high bandwidth and a lot of protection against attacks. They might
be able to easily sustain the worst possible attack from one or two people, but when
100 different servers start attack, it gets bad.
--
-Scott
Declude: Anti-virus and Anti-spam solutions for IMail. http://www.declude.com
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