Denial of Service Attack - Essay Example

 Denial of service attacks is common in businesses and organizational websites. Perpetrators of these attacks target services or sites that are hosted by high-profile servers. These include credit card payment systems, banks, and root name servers. The article on denial of service attacks that will be used is Dave Neal’s “Denial of Service Attacks Exploits White House Press Machine”. This article was published in The Inquirer on November 12, 2014.

According to this article, attackers used the White House press release machine as a way of gaining network trust. The White House made this discovery when it updated its internet report with a caution that attackers are exploiting the facility’s press release machine. These attackers are using content emanating from the White House to gain network trust. They are using DNS reflection attacks to exploit the press machine. Attackers who target the network at the White House are designing large DNS text records to increase amplification and magnify their attacks. These attackers create their text records to amplify the responses as required (Neal, 2014). This helps them to direct traffic to targeted sites. The targeted traffic, which is amplified overwhelms the targeted site and makes it unable to respond to requests. In this case, the attacks saturate the target network or machine with amplified external communication requests. These requests come in large numbers to prevent the machine from responding to legitimate traffic. They also cause the network or machine to respond slowly to legitimate traffic. Denial of service attacks eventually leads to server overload. This technique is effective because the text records can achieve the largest possible response. The attacks that were observed lasted for 5 hours and created a bandwidth load that peaked at 4.3Gbps (Neal, 2014). The text record technique has been extensively used to target entertainment websites, particularly video game websites. In other cases, the attacks may force a targeted computer to consume its resources or reset. As a result, the targeted computer is unable to provide its intended services. This also obstructs the communication media between the victim and the intended user so that they no longer communicate effectively.  

Conclusion

A denial of service attack is used to make a network resource or machine unavailable to its intended users. These attacks comprise attempts to indefinitely or temporarily suspend or interrupt a host of services connected to the internet. According to Neal (2014), attackers are amplifying content from the White House and using the content to attack other networks. The targeted network, computer, or website is overwhelmed with incoming traffic to the extent that it cannot provide its intended service to users.