What is a DoS attack?

Answer 1

* A means of burdening or effectively shutting down a remote system by bombarding it with traffic from many other computers. ...

www.antispywarecoalition.org/documents/GlossaryJune292006.htm * A type of denial of service attack in which an attacker uses malicious code installed on various computers to attack a single target. This methods may be used by an attacker to have a greater effect on the target than is possible with a single attacking machine.

www.imvajra.com/glossary1.html * A type of external internet attack, in which multiple sources attack a single target system, with the goal being denial of service for its users. ...

www.drcomputer.com/glossary.html * On the Internet, a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is one in which a multitude of compromised systems attack a single target, thereby ...

www.primode.com/glossary.html * Acronym for Distributed Denial of Service attack. An attack on a remote destination with a collection of PCs often under the control of a virus or ...

www.pctechbytes.com/glossary/d.htm * Distributed Denial-of-Service Attack The act of loading malignant code onto a host of other machines in order to perform a Denial-of-Service attack.

substratum.ca/subs/Resources/TechTerms/ * A Distributed Denial of Service attack; a DoS attack that originates from many different (geographically and network topographically) sources, on ...

en.wiktionary.org/wiki/DDOS

Answer 2

DoS stands for 'Denial of Service'. A DoS attack is a way of attacking a system such that service to any other legitimate request is denied, or hampered to the point where it is useless.

A DoS depends on the type of system. For example, if a system only allows 5 connections a DoS service could use all 5 connections so that the system could not allow a further legitimate connection. Another way to create a DoS for a service based system is to send a great number of requests such that the server can not handle them all in time, resulting in connections 'timing out' due to lack of a response.

DDOS:

Distributed Denial of Service, or DDoS however is several IPs flooding another IP and ports simultaneously, causing a "Denial of Service" or simply, an overload of information. This causes service to be unavailable to other computers, and can cause massive network and server shutdowns.