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  1. #1
    Join Date
    Jan 2003
    Posts
    674

    Question What is a DDOS Attack exactly?

    Hi all,

    Ive been reading a lot of threads concerning DDOS attacks.... And I admit I only have a vague idea of what it is, except I know its bad news if I am on the server that is being attacked... downtime etc.

    So can some professional give me a clear explanation whats a DDOS attack?

    Thanks
    Scout

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Mar 2003
    Location
    London Ontario, Canada
    Posts
    986
    A Distrubuted Denial of Service Attack (DDOS) is when mallicous code existing on a number of machines (often passed to that machine as a virus or trojan) is instructed to send misformed packets to an IP or set of IPs.

    Often the infected machines can be controled through IRC bots. This means that the infected machines can be used to conduct more than one DDOS.

    This also means that malformed packets attacking an IP (or set of IPS) are doing so from many many different locations.

    The result of sending malformed packets to a host result in that host consuming resources to deal with the packets. Eventually the host cannot accept anymore packets and access to that host becomes impossible (Service Denied via an Attack).

    This is a hard attack to defend against because the source machines of the packets is often just a dumb machine infected to conduct the attack.

    It is harder when the malformed packets attack multiple ports. Filtering the DDOS on the switch (layer 2 or layer 3) becomes near impossible when the incoming packets have nothing in common which can be used as a signature to filter against.

    Cheers
    Jeff
    Last edited by idologicJeff; 11-05-2003 at 10:07 PM.
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  3. #3
    Join Date
    Aug 2003
    Location
    Toronto, ON
    Posts
    124
    Pretty much as idologicJeff put it .

    In really simple terms, it spams the webserver with traffic until the webserver is "overloaded" with the requests and the requests from "real" customers will not be able to go through.

  4. #4
    Join Date
    Jan 2003
    Posts
    674
    Ahh... Thanks!

  5. #5
    Join Date
    Oct 2003
    Location
    InternEt
    Posts
    25
    Ddos?Lol
    i have a tool.may be can help out..
    but it is chinese.

    MissLove

  6. #6
    Join Date
    Apr 2002
    Posts
    42
    Steve Gibson has an excellent article detailing a DDOS attack that was directed at his site GRC.com. Check it out here. It is a really great read.

  7. #7
    Originally posted by Sem
    Steve Gibson has an excellent article detailing a DDOS attack that was directed at his site GRC.com. Check it out here. It is a really great read.
    I agree, I read that article a while back and it does have a lot of nice info, athough I don't exactly agree with everything mr. Gibson says/does.

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