What is Denial of Service (DoS) attack?
DoS is an attack that prevents legitimate users from accessing a particular resource making that resource unavailable.
The resource can be a website, your own computer, email, database or any other information that you as a user are authorized to access.
In DoS attacks on websites, that attacker floods the target server with so many requests that it cannot respond to legitimate traffic.
What is Distributed Denial of Service attack?
DDoS attacks are DoS attacks that are carried out via multiple systems simultaneously attacking a single system.
Corporate and government websites are frequently the target of DDoS attacks. Many hackers now view DDoS as a legitimate form of protest which is popularly known as Hacktivism.
What are the threats?
In many Dos, DDoS attacks, the source machine is a compromised one, which is simply being remotely controlled by an attacker. This makes it really difficult to track down the perpetrators.
What are the risks?
DoS/DDoS attacks are not very sophisticated in nature and are difficult to sustain over a long time. However the consequences of shutting down or blocking access to critical services may be severe.
