DoS attack

Very prolific on cable networks and amoungst IRC lamers, denial of service attacks against the windows TCP/IP stack have become increasingly common in the past few years, starting with the now famous winnuke attack, which just happened to appear at the same time as the internet became popular amongst the masses, and according the 15 year old script kiddiez.

That's not to say that it's a windows only problem, for example Teardrop effected linux as well, there was a BSD attack in late 1998, and Sun attacks have existed for years. It's just that windows has a lot more of them of late, partially due to a poorly designed TCP/IP stack, partially due to it being the most popular target

DOS attacks are difficult to track, because the packets received by the server have forged their return address to be a bogus IP.

The improvement of server technology has made a DOS attack from a single computer difficult, when not impossible. Thus, the Distributed Denial of Service attack, or DDOS, has come about. A DDOS attack works like this:

1. The hacker/cracker/script kiddie breaks into a bunch of computers and installs a slave program on them.
2. Our Bad Guy picks out his target.
3. The Bad Guy uses his own computer to tell his slave computers to start sending phony page view requests to the target.
4. The target gets overwhelmed with page view requests from dozens, if not hundreds of slave computers.

A DOS attack itself should not be confused with hacking or cracking, as the attacker never gains any access to the target machine.

DoS attack //

[Usenet,common; note that it's unrelated to `DOS' as name of an operating system] Abbreviation for Denial-Of-Service attack. This abbreviation is most often used of attempts to shut down newsgroups with floods of spam, or to flood network links with large amounts of traffic, or to flood network links with large amounts of traffic, often by abusing network broadcast addresses. Compare slashdot effect.

--The Jargon File version 4.3.1, ed. ESR, autonoded by rescdsk.