Читать книгу Cybersecurity For Dummies - Joseph Steinberg - Страница 37

A denial-of-service (DoS) attack is one in which an attacker intentionally attempts to either partially cripple or totally paralyze a computer or computer network by flooding it with large amounts of requests or data, which overload the target and make it incapable of responding properly to legitimate requests.

In many cases, the requests sent by the attacker are each, on their own, legitimate — for example, a normal request to load a web page. In other cases, the requests aren’t normal requests. Instead, they leverage knowledge of various protocols to send requests that optimize, or even magnify, the effect of the attack.

In any case, denial-of-service attacks work by overwhelming computer systems’ central processing units (CPUs) and/or memory, utilizing all the available network communications bandwidth, and/or exhausting networking infrastructure resources such as routers.