DoS Attack Identifier — TechKnowSurge

About this interactive

A denial of service attack has one goal: make a service or network unusable for the people who are supposed to be using it. This activity asks you to tell apart the four ways the lesson shows that happening. Two of them are floods. An attacker sends a server more requests than it can handle (web page requests, ping requests, requests to open a connection) until it has nothing left for real users. If all of that traffic comes from one machine, it is a DoS attack. If it comes from many machines at once, usually a botnet of hacked computers or devices, it is a distributed denial of service, or DDoS. The only question that separates them is how many machines are attacking. That difference matters in practice: a flood from one address can be blocked, but a flood from thousands of addresses cannot be blocked without also blocking real visitors. The other two attacks do not flood a server at all. They go after the wireless connection itself. In a deauthentication attack, the attacker sends the access point a fake version of the message a device sends when it leaves the network, and the access point disconnects the real device. In a jamming attack, the attacker broadcasts a strong signal on the same frequency, so the airwaves are full of noise and nothing can get through. Deauthentication fakes a message; jamming drowns everything out. Jamming also works on more than Wi-Fi: GPS, cellular and Bluetooth can all be jammed.

What you'll learn

Identify denial of service attacks as DoS, DDoS, Wi-Fi deauthentication or jamming
Distinguish a DoS attack from a DDoS attack by how many machines are sending the flood
Explain how deauthentication and jamming knock devices off a wireless network without flooding a server

Aligned to

CompTIA Security+

2.4 Given a scenario, analyze indicators of malicious activity.

CompTIA Network+

4.2 Summarize various types of attacks and their impact to the network.

Key terms

Denial of Service: An attack that floods a system or network with traffic to make it unavailable to legitimate users.
Distributed Denial of Service: An attack that uses multiple systems to flood a target with traffic, making it unavailable to legitimate users.
Deauthentication Attack: A wireless denial-of-service attack in which an attacker spoofs a client's MAC address to send forged deauthentication frames to an access point, forcibly disconnecting the client.
Jamming: A denial-of-service attack that disrupts wireless communication by transmitting interfering signals that degrade or block electromagnetic signal transmission between devices.
Botnet: A network of compromised computers controlled by an attacker, often used to conduct distributed attacks.
Flooding Attack: A type of denial of service attack that overwhelms a target device by sending excessive requests or traffic until its resources are exhausted and it can no longer serve legitimate users.
Wireless Access Point: A device that allows wireless devices to connect to a wired network using Wi-Fi.

Topics

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