Title: Denial of Service Attacks: Methods, Tools, Defenses

Abstract

The goal of this tutorial is to clarify what the Denial of Service Attacks (DoS) is, to show different modes of the attacks, what are the tools used for the attacks and finally to explain how to defend your network from such attack.

The DoS attack can be committed in several different ways, and in this tutorial, we cover the most widely used one - the attack directed to the web server and committed from outside of the system.

In the first part of the tutorial, different modes of attack are explained. Second part covers evolution of DoS tools - from simple console applications, to complex distributed systems. Third part gives some ways to defend your network in two ways: one is from engineering point of view and the other one from organizational point of view.

There is no final solution for this problem, but this tutorial can help in improving the systems defenses and in minimizing the damage of DoS attacks (in some cases, the damage caused from DoS attack was measured in millions of dollars).