Report on Denial-of-Service and DDoS Attacks: Security Challenges

This report provides an overview of Denial-of-Service (DoS) and Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks, detailing their mechanisms and classifications. DoS attacks are categorized into flooding and crashing services, including buffer overflow, ICMP, and SYN attacks. DDoS attacks, which utilize multiple computer systems to target servers, websites, or network resources, are further divided into traffic, bandwidth, application, and protocol attacks. The key difference lies in the scale, with DoS attacks using a single computer and internet connection, while DDoS attacks employ multiple systems to overwhelm the target. The report references various studies to support its analysis of these security threats.

Running head: DENIAL-OF-SERVICE AND AND DISTRIBUTED DENIAL-OF-SERVICE ATTACKS
Denial of Service and Distributed Denial of Service Attacks
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1DENIAL-OF-SERVICE AND AND DISTRIBUTED DENIAL-OF-SERVICE ATTACKS
Denial-of-Service Attack:
Denial-of-Service attack or DoS attack generally refers to the type of attack which is done so as
to shut down a machine or a total network and initially making it inaccessible for the users who
intends to use them (Zhang et al., 2015). This type of attack is generally done by flooding the
targeted network or machine with traffic or by means of sending traffic so as to trigger the crash
of the machine or the network. For both the cases the legitimate users are deprived from the
using of the service of the resources they wish to use. DoS attacks can be classified into two
types and this includes the flooding services and crashing services (Mantas et al., 2015). The
flooding services are further classified into “Buffer overflow attacks”, “ICMP attack” and lastly
“SYN attack”.
Distributed Denial-of-Service Attack:
Distributed Denial-of-Service attack or DDoS attack mainly refers to the attack that is associated
with attacking a target by making use of multiple computer systems. The targets mainly include
the server, website or other network resources (Yu, 2014). After selection of the target Denial of
service attack is done for the users. In this type of attack the flooding of the target by messages,
malformed packets or connections requests is done initially leading to the slowing down of the
system. The system might even crash f shut down which is the main reason for denying of the
services for the legitimate users (Osanaiye, Choo & Dlodlo, 2016). There are many types of
DDoS attack and this includes the “Traffic attack”, “bandwidth attack”, “application attack”,
“protocol attack” and many more. The basic difference between DoS and DDoS attack is that
DoS attack makes use of one computer and one internet connection in order the flood the whole

2DENIAL-OF-SERVICE AND AND DISTRIBUTED DENIAL-OF-SERVICE ATTACKS
system whereas in DDoS attack multiple computer and internet connections are used so as to
flood the system.

3DENIAL-OF-SERVICE AND AND DISTRIBUTED DENIAL-OF-SERVICE ATTACKS
References:
Mantas, G., Stakhanova, N., Gonzalez, H., Jazi, H. H., & Ghorbani, A. A. (2015). Application-
layer denial of service attacks: taxonomy and survey. International Journal of
Information and Computer Security, 7(2-4), 216-239.
Osanaiye, O., Choo, K. K. R., & Dlodlo, M. (2016). Distributed denial of service (DDoS)
resilience in cloud: review and conceptual cloud DDoS mitigation framework. Journal of
Network and Computer Applications, 67, 147-165.
Yu, S. (2014). Distributed denial of service attack and defense(pp. 15-29). Springer New York.
Zhang, H., Cheng, P., Shi, L., & Chen, J. (2015). Optimal denial-of-service attack scheduling
with energy constraint. IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, 60(11), 3023-3028.