Such a title is the introduction to a really heavy menu. Both are perhaps, the most dangerous attacks that can be implemented online. Consequences for targets are absolutely not pleasant. Servers’ outages lead to big losses in terms of time, money, users’ and partners’ trust.
Criminals’ purposes define the strength of the attack.
- To demand a ransom.
- To call attention or defending personal or political ideas.
- To show power. Some hackers look for respect in their community through such attacks.
- To delete a rival competitor through these unfair methods.
- To distract companies’ owners from data breaching.
Denial of Service (DoS) attacks
DoS is an online attack that uses an infected source to send big loads of traffic to its target with the clear objective of shutting it down. Users won’t be able to access it until the situation is fixed.
Attackers use traffic in big amounts because they know systems will be overwhelmed while trying to handle it. Also, the resources of the system will be highly demanded. Then users won’t be attended. Everything will slow down until the point of crashing.
Besides flooding systems with traffic, DoS can work by exploiting vulnerabilities that can lead the target to crash. Knowing those, criminals choose a weapon to attack, a proper input to be sent. That way, they destabilize the victim’s system until it gets offline.
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks
This cyber-attack is executed to totally stopping systems’, servers’ or networks’ functionality. Again, the means to attack is traffic. But in this case, we talk about massive loads of traffic driven from multiple infected devices. That is why it is “distributed”. Attack sources can be located at different points of the world. This makes it more dangerous than a DoS attack.
Sluggishness is a symptom that can alert the target. It can fight back, but if it doesn’t succeed, it will be shut down, and the service for users will be denied.
DDoS attackers have developed and mixed different techniques to attack. Based on the final purpose they have, they can hit their target really strongly. What makes this threat possible is the huge amount of devices connected to the Internet that exists. And it increases every day. Computers, wearables, millions of Internet of Things (IoT), servers… can be infected by criminals to direct all the needed traffic to drown their victim.
DoS vs DDoS attack (differences)
There are important differences between these evil attacks.
Let’s start with a big one between DoS vs DDoS attack. In DoS, the attack is directed from one infected system to a target. This means the attack can be really aggressive, but the target can still have more defense chances because the battle is one-to-one. DDoS operates the attack using multiple infected traffic sources from more than one location, which makes it harder to stop it.
To track the system where the DoS attack is coming from is not hard for technology currently. But imagine the time and resources that it will take to track the multiple sources of a DDoS attack. And if you manage to stop some, many more will keep attacking at the same time.
DDoS gets its malicious objective of shutting down targets so much faster than DoS can. While attacking from multiple sources simultaneously, resources of the attacked system will be strongly demanded, defenses weakened, and it will turn off. It takes longer for DoS to reach that point.
Both attacks use traffic to saturate targets. But the amounts of traffic a DDoS can reach are far larger and more dangerous than the ones DoS can produce.
Conclusion
DoS and DDoS mix different techniques to attack for successfully reaching their malicious purpose. The good news is security tech already offers you defense methods against them. To enhance your security shield always will be better and cheaper than paying for fixing the consequences.
