Among cyber threats, Denial of Service (DoS) attacks are a persistent menace. These attacks not only cause financial losses but also erode trust in a service’s reliability.
Anyone doing business in the digital world, including the clients you serve as a Cyber Insurance broker, must understand how DoS attacks work, the impact they can have, and the best ways to mitigate their danger.
What Is a Denial of Service (DoS) Attack?
Unlike cyber attacks aimed at causing data breaches, a DoS attack aims to render a service inaccessible or unusable, potentially leading to operational disruptions and financial losses.
In such an attack, threat actors craft excessive amounts of incoming requests, or traffic, to consume a target’s specific resources, whether bandwidth, processing power, or memory allocation. This traffic overwhelms the target to the point that legitimate users are unable to access it.
Attackers often exploit software vulnerabilities or operating systems’ weaknesses to initiate DoS attacks. By striking at their target’s weakest points, DoS attacks can quickly sabotage its normal operations.
What’s the Difference Between DoS and DDoS Attacks?
Threat actors generally execute a Denial of Service attack from a single source. Although effective, single-source attacks can be relatively straightforward to mitigate once the offending source is identified and blocked.
In contrast, a Distributed Denial of Service attack (DDoS attack) is more formidable. It often uses a network of compromised computers known as botnets. These computers have been secretly infected with malicious software, allowing them to carry out tasks without their users’ knowledge. Botnets can comprise thousands—even millions—of infected devices, resulting in a highly coordinated and potent attack vector.
The botnet is a launchpad, sending massive amounts of traffic toward a target server, flooding it with more requests than it can handle. The server has trouble distinguishing between malicious and legitimate traffic. Shutting down a single point of origin isn’t sufficient, since the traffic flows from distributed sources.
DDoS attacks also often involve amplification attacks that increase the volume of incoming requests, compounding their destructive capability.
The end result? As does a Denial of Service attack, a Distributed Denial of Service attack effectively disables the targeted infrastructure, potentially bringing down websites, online services, and even essential business functions for hours or days on end.
What Are the Common Types of DoS Attacks?
Generally, Denial of Service attacks fall into one of three main categories:
Volume-Based Attacks
Volume-based attacks (also called volumetric attacks or flood attacks) are the most straightforward type of DoS attack. Attackers generate massive amounts of incoming requests from a single source or multiple sources, effectively crowding out legitimate traffic.
Protocol-Based Attacks
Protocol-based attacks disrupt service by taking advantage of weaknesses in network protocol operations, the very protocols that facilitate communication over the internet. These attacks target such resources as firewalls and load balancers to disrupt the flow of legitimate traffic.
In this category, two common Denial of Service attacks are the SYN flood and the Teardrop attack.
In SYN flood attacks, malicious actors send repeated SYN (synchronize) requests to initiate connections, overwhelming the target server with half-open connections until its resources are exhausted.
The Teardrop attack sends malformed and fragmented IP packets—the internet’s fundamental data transmission units—to servers. When the servers attempt to reassemble these packets, they malfunction or crash altogether.
Application Layer Attacks
Application layer attacks deplete a target server’s resources by inundating an application with a flood of requests that imitate legitimate traffic. This overload leaves the server unable to respond to genuine users.
Commonly known forms of these attacks include HTTP flood attacks, which exploit the HTTP protocol to send numerous requests, and Slowloris, which keeps connections open as long as possible to exhaust server resources.
What Are Some Common Targets of DoS Attacks?
DoS attacks typically target high-profile websites and services, often those associated with financial institutions, government agencies, and online service providers.
Attackers choose these targets due to their significant user bases and their critical nature. By disrupting these services, malicious actors can cause substantial financial losses and degrade public trust in the target’s reliability and security.
Attackers also target small to medium businesses, knowing these organizations often have insufficient protection measures. Ongoing attacks on these targets not only affects their ability to provide services but can also damage their reputation.
What Are Ways To Prevent and Detect DoS Attacks?
By learning to recognize various signs of DoS and DDoS attacks, adopting traditional and modern defense techniques, and establishing robust incident response plans, organizations can do much to counteract and mitigate them.
Signs of an Ongoing DoS Attack
All of these signs may indicate an ongoing DoS or DDoS attack:
- Slow network performance
- Inability to access websites or online resources
- Sudden loss of connectivity
- Unavailability of services
- Unexpected surges in traffic
- Frequent system crashes or application failures
- Suspicious network activity or traffic patterns
- Alerts from network monitoring systems or firewalls
Traditional Defensive Measures
Traditional defensive measures against Denial of Service attacks emphasize robust infrastructure and proactive network management.
Intrusion prevention systems (IPS) form the backbone of these defenses. They are crucial in detecting and blocking undesirable incoming traffic. Organizations must regularly update operating systems and applications to fix software vulnerabilities threat actors could exploit.
Deploying firewalls to filter out malicious traffic and configuring routers to manage traffic flow are also fundamental practices. Rate limiting is another effective technique, ensuring the target server can manage traffic by limiting the number of requests per second.
AI-Driven Solutions
Artificial intelligence (AI) systems can analyze vast numbers of incoming requests and recognize patterns signifying a potential threat. By distinguishing between legitimate requests and malicious traffic rapidly, AI can also undertake corrective actions in real time.
AI technologies excel at learning from previous attack vectors. They continuously update the system’s defensive parameters to tackle new threats. For instance, AI can enhance detection of volumetric attacks and Teardrop attacks by refining detection algorithms over time, adjusting to the emerging strategies malicious actors use.
Incident Response Planning
Incident response plans are critical for organizations to effectively manage and mitigate the impacts of DoS and DDoS attacks. These strategic frameworks outline specific procedures for identifying, responding to, and recovering from such cyber threats, ensuring minimal disruption to business operations.
Key components of an effective incident response plan include:
- Rapid identification of attack vectors
- Immediate isolation of affected systems
- Coordination with internet service providers (ISPs) and anti-DoS service providers
- Clear communication channels to maintain transparency and coordination during an attack
Get Your Clients the Cyber Insurance They Need
The threat of Denial of Service attacks looms large over businesses of all sizes. Guiding your business clients toward comprehensive Cyber Insurance policies is an important piece of their protection.
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