Kaplan University
Unit 2 Assignment

A Denial of Service (DoS) Attack is an attempt to disrupt a company’s network and services by preventing access to resources by users authorized to use those sources like a company’s employees and customers (Dulaney, 2009). When one person attempts this from a single system it is called a DoS attack, but when a group of nodes on a network simultaneously flood the site with attack packets it is called a Distributed Denial of Service attack or DDoS. These attacks are meant to disrupt the company’s website and gain access to its computers. To accomplish this, the Attacker will recruit vulnerable machines on separate networks, mainly ones not running antivirus through different scanning techniques and will then install an attack toolkit to the machine making it a Zombie or Slave (Patrikakis, Masikos, Zouraraki, 2004). Then the infected computer will look for other vulnerable computers in which it can install the attack toolkit using the same process and creating an army of computers (Patrikakis, Masikos, Zouraraki, 2004). Once this army is assembled the attacker can wake up all of the slave computers, now on his network and have them all send attack packets to the company’s IP address and can even use spoofed source IP address. This way the slave computers IP addresses are hidden so the victim cannot trace the attack back to them. This will combine a DDoS attack with a Spoofing attack. Protecting against DDoS attacks are difficult if not impossible. Companies have tried to come up with software and different methods to help prevent attacks, but the attackers manage to find new weaknesses of protocols to exploit. The best defense against DDoS attacks is preventive mechanisms. The preventive mechanisms try to eliminate the possibility of an attack or to ensure the network can withstand an attack without denying