The newly discovered Mirai botnet attacks security journalist Brian Krebs' website with 620Gbps, massively disrupting his website but ultimately failing due to Akamai DDoS protection. The following list helps illustrate the varying size between DDoS attacks and how that size has grown in the past few years.

Mucking Around/Exploration/Testing: Sometimes, a DDoS happens because someone, somewhere is testing a new technique or script, and it goes wrong (or works perfectly!).

There have been multiple examples of criminal enterprises using this DDoS distraction technique to commit other crimes. At the same time, the real attack takes place elsewhere.

Cover for Larger Attack: The DDoS activity may actually be cover for a different attack vector, running interference to keep an IT or cyber response team occupied.

Similarly, knocking government sites offline using a DDoS can force a government into action or is a display of protest. A DDoS attack can cost a business or other organization substantially in terms of downtime, server costs, data fees, engineers, and more.

Hacktivism and Politics: Some hacktivist groups, such as Anonymous, are well known for using DDoS attacks to knock their targets offline for prolonged periods.

In some cases, DDoS attacks have been used to knock competitors offline, forcing service users to defect to the online competitor.

If you flood the servers with requests, regular users cannot access the service.

Service Disruption: At the root of the DDoS is a service disruption.

There are many reasons why an attacker will opt to DDoS a target, such as cover for a different attack vector or to cause financial harm to the victim. It sounds confusing but takes place in the blink of an eye. Finally, the SYN-ACK, which is essentially the requester confirming the data has arrived. Second, the response to the data request, known as the ACK (short for Acknowledgement).

First, the request for data, known as SYN (short for Synchronization). When you make a request on the internet, three things happen.

For example, a protocol attack might overburden a firewall or load balancer, causing them to cease operation.Ī SYN Flood DDoS atack is a useful example. Protocol AttackĪ protocol DDoS attack targets the victim's network, targeting server resources of a different nature. Think of it like hitting your browser refresh button thousands of times, but thousands of other browsers are also refreshing simultaneously. One common application layer DDoS attack type is the HTTP Flood, where an attacker creates as many HTTP requests as fast as possible. These requests are almost indistinguishable from regular users' requests, which makes mitigating an application layer DDoS attack difficult.Īpplication layer DDoS attacks primarily focus on disturbing HTTP traffic.

Website crasher online