Understanding DoS attacks and the best free DoS attacking tools [Updated for 2020]

A Denial of Service (DoS) attack is designed to cause service outages. These attacks can easily cost an organization a significant amount in damages and wasted resources, even if the attacker does not demand a ransom to stop the attack. A number of different free DDoS tools exist, making it cheap and easy for even unsophisticated attackers to use this attack technique.

What is a denial-of-service attack?

A DoS attack is any attack that is designed to take a system offline or make it unavailable to legitimate users. The goal of the attack could be to hurt the target organization, extort a ransom to allow services to be restored or cover up another attack.

DoS attacks can take advantage of a number of different vulnerabilities within a computer system. Buffer overflow vulnerabilities and other programming flaws can be exploited to cause a segmentation fault or other error that causes a program to crash.

However, the most common method of performing a DoS attack is to take advantage of bottlenecks within a computing system. Every component of a system has a maximum amount of traffic, data, connections and so on that it is capable of processing, and the entire system is limited by the component with the lowest threshold. Most DoS attacks are designed to exceed this maximum capacity, making it impossible for the system to process legitimate user requests.

DoS attacks can be performed in multiple different ways. Examples of common attack techniques include:

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• Volumetric attacks: Network connections and network interface cards (NICs) have set bandwidth limitations. Volumetric attacks attempt to overwhelm these systems by sending more data than they can handle. These attacks may be composed of a massive number of small packets or a smaller number of very large ones.
• Protocol-level attacks: Computers have a set number of (Read more...)