UDP Flood
User Datagram Protocol is a sessionless networking protocol. One common DDoS attack method is referred to as a UDP flood. Random ports on the target machine are flooded with packets that cause it to listen for applications on that those ports and report back with a ICMP packet.
SYN Flood
A SYN flood attack will send repeated spoofed requests from a variety of sources at a target server. The server will respond with an ACK packet to complete the TCP connection, but instead of closing the connection the connection is allowed to timeout. Eventually, and with a strong enough attack, the host resources will be exhausted and the server will go offline.
Ping of Death
Ping of death (”POD”) is a denial of service attack that manipulates IP protocol by sending packets larger than the maximum byte allowance, which under IPv4 is 65,535 bytes. Large packets are divided across multiple IP packets – called fragments – and once reassembled create a packet larger than 65,535 bytes. The resulting behemoth packet causes servers to reboot or crash.
Peer-to-Peer Attacks
Peer-to-Peer servers present an opportunity for attackers. What happens is instead of using a botnet to siphon traffic towards the target, a peer-to-peer server is exploited to route traffic to the target website. When done successfully, people using the file-sharing hub are instead sent to the target website until the website is overwhelmed and sent offline.
Application Level Attacks
Application level attacks target areas that have more vulnerabilities. Rather than attempt to overwhelm the entire server, an attacker will focus their attack on one – or a few – applications. Web-based email apps, WordPress, Joomla, and forum software are good examples of application specific targets.
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