What is DOS / DDOS attack?

DOS stands for Denial of service attack.

Another more sophisticated attack of the same category is called DDOS or Distributed Denial of Service attack.

The basic purpose of denial of service attack is to make a website or service unreachable or unavailable for users over the internet.

The mechanism is simple, the attacker first creates an army of bots. A bot is a computer that has been hacked by a hacker and is now being used for the attack.

After creating a large army of these bots the attacker deploys a special code on these computer. After deployment these computers start bombarding the website or server with continuous HTTP requests or ping requests.

The target is to overwhelm the server or website with these attacks to such a level that it may become unavailable for other legitimate users.

DOS and DDOS attacks are one of the most dangerous and hard to counter attacks. A DOS or DDOS attack when properly launched can render a website or server unavailable for service within a very short span of time.

The DDOS or distributed denial of service attacks are very hard to track back since multiple computers are being used in these attacks and the attacker had already hacked these computers so they are also a victim in turn not the original attacker.

To protect your website from a DOS or DDOS attack you must define a standard security policy which specify the rules of connection and session maintenance for hosts.