Chapter 3(Part2)Cyber Threat: Denial-of-Service (DoS) and Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Attacks

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering Denial-of-Service (DoS) and Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack types, mechanisms, motives, and risk reduction strategies.

Denial-of-Service (DoS) Attack

A cyberattack that floods a machine or network with false requests in order to disrupt business operations, making users unable to perform routine tasks like accessing email or websites.

Buffer Overflows

The most common form of DoS attack where the adversary drives more traffic to a network address than the system can handle, consuming all available buffers or memory storage regions.

Stack Overflow

The most common type of buffer overflow attack where a computer program attempts to use memory space in the call stack that has been allocated to it, overriding its boundaries.

Unicode Overflow

A type of buffer overflow created when any Unicode character is inserted into an expected ASCII input.

Unicode and ASCII

Encoding standards that allow computers to represent text.

Flood Attacks

DoS attacks that occur when the system receives too much traffic for the server to manage, causing it to slow down or stop.

ICMP Floods

Commonly called smurf or ping attacks, these exploit misconfigured network devices by deploying spoofed packets that "ping" devices without waiting for a reply.

SYN Flood

An attack that sends connection requests to a server but never completes the metaphorical "handshake," saturating all open ports.

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack

An orchestrated attack launched from multiple locations by several systems simultaneously, leveraging multiple devices across various geographies.

Botnet

A network of compromised computers or devices supervised by a command and control (C&C) channel used to carry out synchronized attacks.

Zombies

Connected devices, such as IoT devices, whose weaknesses are exploited to be utilized by cybercriminals in a botnet.

Mirai botnet

An infamous network used to launch a series of attacks by exploiting unsecured baby monitors.

InfoSecurity Magazine Statistics

Reported $2.9\text{ million}$ DDoS attacks in Q1 of $2021$, representing an increase of $31\%$ over the same period in $2020$.

Tactical Motives

Attacks waged as part of a larger campaign, such as using a DDoS attack to divert attention away from normal IT tasks to target something else (the "bait-and-switch" cyberattack).

Memcached

A service used to speed up database and web-based transactions that can be exploited as a tool in DDoS attacks.

Attack Surface Area

The ports, protocols, or applications exposed to communication; minimizing this area limits options for attackers and concentrates mitigation efforts.

Web application Firewall (WAF)

A tool used to filter and monitor HTTP traffic to a specific web server or application, commonly part of cloud services like AWS, Azure, or CloudFlare.

Load balancing servers

Devices utilized by IT professionals to deflect traffic away from certain resources during a DDoS attack.