Understanding Denial of Service Attacks

A denial of service (DoS) attack is anything that reduces the availability of a resource.

DoS attacks can target physical hardware and infrastructure. A malware-based DoS attack might

destroy a file system or engineer excessive CPU, memory, storage,

or network bandwidth consumption. A DoS attack can also exploit protocol or configuration

weaknesses at different network layers. DoS attacks against network hosts and gateways are typically

of a type called distributed DoS (DDoS). DDoS means that the attack is launched

from multiple hosts simultaneously. Typically, a threat actor will compromise machines

to use as handlers in a command and control network. The handlers are used to compromise