- Introduction: What is Denial-of-Service (DoS)?
- The DoS Scenario
- The Security Breach
- Corrective Actions
- Don't Be an Unwitting Collaborator
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Don't Be an Unwitting Collaborator
Denial-of-service attacks can result in significant loss of time and money for many organizations. They also offer cyberterrorists an easy, inexpensive, and anonymous way to disrupt and harm our national information infrastructure. And it's even easier. Like any knowledgeable enemy, the cyberterrorist knows how to use our technology against us. Here's an example.
A cyberterrorist's goal is to gain administrative/root control the easiest way possible. They do this by focusing on a small number of exploits, and then searching the entire Internet for that exploit. Sooner or later they find someone vulnerable. Some of them are advanced users who develop their own tools and leave behind sophisticated backdoors. Others have no idea what they're doing and only know how to type "go" at the command prompt. Regardless of their skill level, all cyberterrorists share a common strategy: search for a specific weakness, and then exploit that weakness.
Crackers can use sites like Exploit World and Beyond-Security's SecuriTeam page to download tools and run them against machines on the Internet looking for victims—and no cracking skill is needed. Our enemies also have access to these sites, and programmers that can use these as stepping-stones to create better exploits to use against us.
To quote Steve Gibson of Gibson Research Corporation, "When those insecure and maliciously potent PCs are mated to high-bandwidth Internet connections, we are going to experience an escalation of Internet terrorism the likes of which has never been seen before."
Apply the corrective actions described here and in the referenced material, and don't became an unwitting collaborator in a massive DoS attack.