What is Denial of Service Attack ? - Cyber security

 

What Is a Denial of Service (DoS) Attack?

The internet works because millions of servers constantly receive and respond to requests. But what happens when a server is overwhelmed with more requests than it can handle? It stops responding. And that exact weakness is what attackers exploit through a Denial of Service (DoS) attack.

A DoS attack aims to make a website, application, or entire network unavailable. Instead of breaking in or stealing data, the attacker’s goal is simple: shut the service down by flooding it with traffic or forcing it to crash. Even though the technique sounds straightforward, the impact can be massive—loss of revenue, damaged reputation, and hours or days of downtime.



                             What is Denial of Service Attack ? - kaashiv infotech cyber security

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How DoS Attacks Actually Work?

A normal server can handle thousands of requests per second. In a DoS attack, the attacker pushes that limit far beyond what the system can manage. This overload forces the victim’s device or server to freeze, restart, or simply stop responding.

Common methods include:

  • Flood Attacks: Sending enormous volumes of fake requests until resources are consumed.

  • Buffer Overflow Attacks: Sending data designed to crash the system directly.

  • Logic-Based Attacks: Exploiting bugs or protocol weaknesses to force shutdowns.

DoS attacks are often the foundation for more aggressive versions—like Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS)—where thousands of compromised devices attack at once.

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Types of DoS Attacks

1. Volumetric Attacks

These focus on consuming the entire bandwidth of a network. The attacker aims to block all legitimate traffic by flooding the pipeline with junk data.

2. Protocol Attacks

Instead of bandwidth, these target server resources like firewalls, load balancers, or connection tables.

3. Application Layer Attacks

These attack specific functions, like repeatedly requesting a heavy web page that consumes CPU and memory each time.

Organizations often look for specialized training, and some rely on kaashiv infotech cyber security programs to help their teams understand real-world attack patterns.

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Modern DoS mitigation often happens at the cloud layer, where traffic scrubbing, load balancing, and distributed filtering are implemented. Cloud Security or Security Operations Center (SOC) courses are great add-ons for strengthening your defensive capabilities—especially if you're planning a career in incident response or monitoring.

Preventing DoS Attacks

While you cannot stop attackers from sending malicious requests, you can minimize the impact:

  • Rate Limiting: Restricts the number of requests a user can send in a time window.

  • Firewalls & Traffic Filtering: Helps block patterns that look suspicious or repetitive.

  • CDNs & Load Balancers: Distribute traffic across multiple servers to prevent overload.

  • Anomaly Detection Tools: Identify sudden traffic spikes before they become outages.

Many businesses reinforce their defensive teams using kaashiv infotech cyber security learning modules to understand detection, filtering, and attack response.

Conclusion

A Denial of Service attack may not steal information, but its ability to shut down essential services makes it one of the most disruptive threats on the internet. Understanding how these attacks work—and how to defend against them—is critical for anyone entering the world of cybersecurity or network management.

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