Question

A hacker overloads the KOI website and shutdowns the service so that legitimate users such as student and staff can no longer access it. Mention the name and describe the type of attack carried out on the KOI website with an explanation

Answer 1

This type of attack is known as Denial of Service (DoS) attack . In the above example, the hacker has particularly used flooding attack for denial of services .

Let us look into each of these attacks seperately-

Denial of Service (DoS) attacks : A “denial of service” or DoS attack is used to tie up a website’s resources so that users who need to access the site cannot do so. This attack meant to shut down a machine or network, making it inaccessible to its intended users.Unlike a virus or malware, a DoS attack doesn’t depend on a special program to run. Instead, it takes advantage of an inherent vulnerability in the way computer networks communicate.

DoS attacks are generally of two types:

• Flooding attacks
• Crash attacks

Flooding attacks : This type of attack is done by sending too much traffic to the server causing them to slow down and eventually stop. Popular flood attacks include:

• ICMP flood - This type of DoS attack sends spoofed packets of information that hit every computer in a targeted network, taking advantage of misconfigured network devices.The network is then triggered to amplify the traffic. This attack is also known as the smurf attack or ping of death.
• SYN flood- A SYN flood is a variation that exploits a vulnerability in the TCP connection sequence.It sends a request to connect to a server, but never completes the handshake. This process continues until all open ports are saturated with requests and none are available for legitimate users to connect to.

Crash attacks: These attacks simply exploit vulnerabilities that cause the target system or service to crash.In these attacks, input is sent that takes advantage of bugs in the target that subsequently crash or severely destabilize the system, so that it can’t be accessed or used.