Unveiling the Invisible Threat: Denial-of-Service (DoS) Attacks

In our interconnected world, where information flows ceaselessly and digital dependency continues to deepen, cyber threats that can disrupt our digital existence. Among these threats is an insidious and pervasive type called a denial-of-service (DoS) attack, which disrupts online services and wreaks chaos in the virtual realm.

Learn more about DoS, its types and how to prevent it from affecting your company. By understanding the mechanisms, motivations and mitigation strategies surrounding DoS attacks, companies can fortify their defenses and safeguard against these disruptive forces.

Read: The Best Practices Against Cyber Attacks

What Is a Denial-of-Service (DoS) Attack?

A DoS attack is an attempt to make a device, website or network unavailable to its intended users by overwhelming it with a flood of illegitimate requests. The idea is simple yet devastatingly effective: inundate the target system with more traffic, requests or data than it can handle and cause it to slow down, crash or become entirely inaccessible, denying access or service to legitimate users. For example, if a company website is only capable of handling a certain number of requests per minute, a cyber attacker can send too many requests, causing the website to lag or even crash so legitimate requests can’t be fulfilled.

The issue with DoS attacks is that companies can’t discern between attack traffic and actual customers. However, some common indicators of a DoS attack are slow or unavailable network performance, inability to access resources or services and issues in network connectivity. An example to look at is the 2016 Dyn attack, which disrupted major websites and caused significant financial losses.

A DoS attack can lead to massive downtime, significant financial losses, operational disruption and reputational damage. Business owners should always be on the lookout; cyber criminals can launch DoS attacks to distract them from other more devious attacks, like malware or ransomware.

Variants of Denial-of-Service Attacks

There are a few types of DoS attacks that every business owner should know:

• Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack: In a DDoS attack, the assault is exactly like a DoS attack, except instead of a single source, the attack is orchestrated from multiple sources, often hijacked computers or Internet of Things (IoT) devices. This forms a botnet, or a network of compromised machines, under the attacker’s control. This distributed approach amplifies the attack’s impact, making mitigation more challenging as the attack traffic comes from multiple diverse locations.
• Application-layer DoS attack: Unlike traditional DoS attacks that target the network infrastructure, application-layer DoS attacks focus on overwhelming specific services or applications running on the target server, like web servers. These attacks exploit vulnerabilities in the application-layer protocols or exhaust server resources by initiating legitimate-looking requests that consume processing power or memory.
• Protocol attack: Also known as state-exhaustion attacks, this type overwhelms network equipment and infrastructure by sending a flood of unwanted traffic, disrupting services.
• Volumetric attack: This final type attempts to consume all of the target’s available bandwidth.

Motivations Behind Denial-of-Service Attacks

Understanding the motivations driving DoS attacks is essential to understand the diverse range of cyber attackers and their objectives.

• Financial gain: Some attackers launch DoS attacks to extort money, usually cryptocurrency, from businesses by threatening to disrupt their services unless a ransom is paid.
• Hacktivism: Hacktivist groups may target organizations or governments to protect ideological, religious or political issues, aiming to raise awareness or cause embarrassment by disrupting online services.
• Competitive advantage: In the cutthroat world of online gaming and e-commerce, competitors might resort to DoS attacks to sabotage rival businesses, gaining a competitive advantage while damaging the competition’s reputation.
• State-sponsored sabotage: Nation-states or state-sponsored actors may launch DoS attacks against critical infrastructure, government agencies or geopolitical adversaries as a form of cyber warfare or espionage.

How to Mitigate Denial-of-Service Attacks

Preventing and mitigating the impact of DoS attacks requires a multifaceted approach encompassing both technical solutions and proactive measures.

• Network segmentation: Segregating network traffic and implementing access controls can help contain the spread of DoS attacks, limiting their impact on critical infrastructure and isolating affected systems.
• Implement firewalls: Firewalls are a simple yet strong defense mechanism against malicious traffic. They can inspect incoming traffic to determine the specific location or IP address before blocking malicious traffic.
• Utilize IDS and IPS: Intrusion detection systems (IDS) and intrusion prevention systems (IPS) enable real-time monitoring and analyzing of network traffic, allowing swift identification and mitigation of malicious activities.
• Rate limiting: Implement rate limiting mechanisms to filter out malicious traffic based on patterns, signatures or abnormal behavior. Rate limiting is when you restrict the number of requests a web server will accept over a specific period of time.
• Develop an incident response plan: Comprehensive incident response plans and regular drills can ensure organizations are well-prepared to mitigate and recover from DoS attacks swiftly and effectively. Plans should include steps for identifying and reporting the attack, isolating affected systems and restoring operations to normal.

Last Step: Partner with a Managed Service Provider like Thriveon

The final step to mitigating DoS attacks is to partner with a managed service provider (MSP) like Thriveon. We offer our clients robust managed IT and cybersecurity services that align with 500 IT best practices to protect them from cyber attacks.

Schedule a meeting now to see how we can help.