A denial of service (DoS) attack is an incident in which a user or organization is deprived of the services of a resource they would normally expect to have. In a distributed denial-of-service, large numbers of compromised systems (sometimes called a botnet) attack a single target. Although a DoS attack does not usually result in the theft of information or other security loss, it can cost the target person or company a great deal of time and money. Typically, the loss of service is the inability of a particular network service, such as e-mail, to be available or the temporary loss of all network connectivity and services. A denial of service attack can also destroy programming and files in affected computer systems. In some cases, DoS attacks have forced Web sites accessed by millions of people to temporarily cease operation. "To perform a DDoS, Attacker's use many different forms. One example is a BotNet, controlled over a Telnet." 1. Distributed Denial-of-Service Attacks Often botnets are used for Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks. A DDoS attack is an attack on a computer system or network that causes a loss of service to users, typically the loss of network connectivity and services by consuming the bandwidth of the victim network or overloading the computational resources of the victim system. In addition, the resources on the path are exhausted if the DDoS-attack causes many packets per second (pps). Each bot we have analyzed so far includes several different possibilities to carry out a DDoS attack against other hosts. Most commonly implemented and also very often used are TCP SYN and UDP flood attacks. Script kiddies apparently consider DDoS an appropriate solution to every social problem. Further research showed that botnets are even used to run commercial DDoS attacks against competing corporations: Operation Cyberslam documents the story of Jay R. Echouafni and Joshua Schichtel alias EMP. Echouafni was indicted on August 25, 2004 on multiple charges of conspiracy and causing damage to protected computers. He worked closely together with EMP who ran a botnet to send bulk mail and also carried out DDoS attacks against the spam blacklist servers. In addition, they took Speedera - a global on-demand computing platform - offline when they ran a paid DDoS attack to take a competitor's website down. Note that DDoS attacks are not limited to web servers, virtually any service available on the Internet can be the target of such an attack. Higher-level protocols can be used to increase the load even more effectively by using very specific attacks, such as running exhausting search queries on bulletin boards or recursive HTTP-floods on the victim's website. Recursive HTTP-flood means that the bots start from a given HTTP link and then follows all links on the provided website in a recursive way. This is also called spidering. 2. Spamming Some bots offer the possibility to open a SOCKS v4/v5 proxy - a generic proxy protocol for TCP/IP-based networking applications (RFC 1928) - on a compromised machine. After having enabled the SOCKS proxy, this machine can then be used for nefarious tasks such as spamming. With the help of a botnet and thousands of bots, an attacker is able to send massive amounts of bulk email (spam). Some bots also implement a special function to harvest email-addresses. Often that spam you are receiving was sent from, or proxied through, grandma's old Windows computer sitting at home. In addition, this can of course also be used to send phishing-mails since phishing is a special case of spam. 3. Sniffing Traffic Bots can also use a packet sniffer to watch for interesting clear-text data passing by a compromised machine. The sniffers are mostly used to retrieve sensitive information like usernames and passwords. But the sniffed data can also contain other interesting information. If a machine is compromised more than once and also a member of more than one botnet, the packet sniffing allows to gather the key information of the other botnet. Thus it is possible to "steal" another botnet. 4. Keylogging If the compromised machine uses encrypted communication channels (e.g. HTTPS or POP3S), then just sniffing the network packets on the victim's computer is useless since the appropriate key to decrypt the packets is missing. But most bots also offer features to help in this situation. With the help of a keylogger it is very easy for an attacker to retrieve sensitive information. An implemented filtering mechanism (e.g. "I am only interested in key sequences near the keyword 'paypal.com'") further helps in stealing secret data. And if you imagine that this keylogger runs on thousands of compromised machines in parallel you can imagine how quickly PayPal accounts are harvested. 5. Spreading new malware In most cases, botnets are used to spread new bots. This is very easy since all bots implement mechanisms to download and execute a file via HTTP or FTP. But spreading an email virus using a botnet is a very nice idea, too. A botnet with 10.000 hosts which acts as the start base for the mail virus allows very fast spreading and thus causes more harm. The Witty worm, which attacked the ICQ protocol parsing implementation in Internet Security Systems (ISS) products is suspected to have been initially launched by a botnet due to the fact that the attacking hosts were not running any ISS services. 6. Installing Advertisement Addons and Browser Helper Objects (BHOs) Botnets can also be used to gain financial advantages. This works by setting up a fake website with some advertisements: The operator of this website negotiates a deal with some hosting companies that pay for clicks on ads. With the help of a botnet, these clicks can be "automated" so that instantly a few thousand bots click on the pop-ups. This process can be further enhanced if the bot hijacks the start-page of a compromised machine so that the "clicks" are executed each time the victim uses the browser. 7. Google AdSense abuse A similar abuse is also possible with Google's AdSense program: AdSense offers companies the possibility to display Google advertisements on their own website and earn money this way. The company earns money due to clicks on these ads, for example per 10.000 clicks in one month. An attacker can abuse this program by leveraging his botnet to click on these advertisements in an automated fashion and thus artificially increments the click counter. This kind of usage for botnets is relatively uncommon, but not a bad idea from an attacker's perspective. 8. Attacking IRC Chat Networks Botnets are also used for attacks against Internet Relay Chat (IRC) networks. Popular among attackers is especially the so called "clone attack": In this kind of attack, the controller orders each bot to connect a large number of clones to the victim IRC network. The victim is flooded by service request from thousands of bots or thousands of channel-joins by these cloned bots. In this way, the victim IRC network is brought down - similar to a DDoS attack. 9. Manipulating online polls/games Online polls/games are getting more and more attention and it is rather easy to manipulate them with botnets. Since every bot has a distinct IP address, every vote will have the same credibility as a vote cast by a real person. Online games can be manipulated in a similar way. Currently we are aware of bots being used that way, and there is a chance that this will get more important in the future. 10. Mass identity theft Often the combination of different functionality described above can be used for large scale identity theft, one of the fastest growing crimes on the Internet. Bogus emails ("phishing mails") that pretend to be legitimate (such as fake PayPal or banking emails) ask their intended victims to go online and submit their private information. These fake emails are generated and sent by bots via their spamming mechanism. These same bots can also host multiple fake websites pretending to be Ebay, PayPal, or a bank, and harvest personal information. Just as quickly as one of these fake sites is shut down, another one can pop up. In addition, keylogging and sniffing of traffic can also be used for identity theft. Common forms of denial of service attacks Buffer Overflow Attacks The most common kind of DoS attack is simply to send more traffic to a network address than the programmers who planned its data buffers anticipated someone might send. The attacker may be aware that the target system has a weakness that can be exploited or the attacker may simply try the attack in case it might work. A few of the better-known attacks based on the buffer characteristics of a program or system include: * Sending e-mail messages that have attachments with 256-character file names to Netscape and Microsoft mail programs * Sending oversized Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) packets (this is also known as the Packet Internet or Inter-Network Groper (ping) of death) * Sending to a user of the Pine e-mail progam a message with a "From" address larger than 256 characters SYN Attack When a session is initiated between the Transport Control Program (TCP) client and server in a network, a very small buffer space exists to handle the usually rapid "hand-shaking" exchange of messages that sets up the session. The session-establishing packets include a SYN field that identifies the sequence in the message exchange. An attacker can send a number of connection requests very rapidly and then fail to respond to the reply. This leaves the first packet in the buffer so that other, legitimate connection requests can't be accommodated. Although the packet in the buffer is dropped after a certain period of time without a reply, the effect of many of these bogus connection requests is to make it difficult for legitimate requests for a session to get established. In general, this problem depends on the operating system providing correct settings or allowing the network administrator to tune the size of the buffer and the timeout period. Teardrop Attack This type of denial of service attack exploits the way that the Internet Protocol (IP) requires a packet that is too large for the next router to handle be divided into fragments. The fragment packet identifies an offset to the beginning of the first packet that enables the entire packet to be reassembled by the receiving system. In the teardrop attack, the attacker's IP puts a confusing offset value in the second or later fragment. If the receiving operating system does not have a plan for this situation, it can cause the system to crash. Smurf Attack In this attack, the perpetrator sends an IP ping (or "echo my message back to me") request to a receiving site The ping packet specifies that it be broadcast to a number of hosts within the receiving site's local network. The packet also indicates that the request is from another site, the target site that is to receive the denial of service. (Sending a packet with someone else's return address in it is called spoofing the return address.) The result will be lots of ping replies flooding back to the innocent, spoofed host. If the flood is great enough, the spoofed host will no longer be able to receive or distinguish real traffic. Viruses Computer viruses, which replicate across a network in various ways, can be viewed as denial-of-service attacks where the victim is not usually specifically targetted but simply a host unlucky enough to get the virus. Depending on the particular virus, the denial of service can be hardly noticeable ranging all the way through disastrous. Physical Infrastructure Attacks Here, someone may simply snip a fiber optic cable. This kind of attack is usually mitigated by the fact that traffic can sometimes quickly be rerouted. " How To protect yourself "If your Internet connection is used only for Internet browsing and the sending and receiving of Internet e-mail, then protecting yourself from most DoS attacks should not be that difficult, provided you are using a good quality (which does not necessarily mean expensive) firewall solution. Nearly all commercially available firewall products provide some level of protection against a DoS attack, though you will not find any that claim to prevent them completely. If you need to provide networked services to outside users, then a number of other strategies can reduce the risk of your becoming the victim of a DoS attack, though they are unlikely to prevent a targeted attack: * On almost all major platforms, you can configure networking parameters such as the amount of available connections and the time span after which the machine will stop trying to reconnect to remote nodes. Increasing the amount of available connections and decreasing the retry time will also help to reduce the impact of many simple DoS attacks. * Another increasingly popular strategy is to employ spoofing filters, which monitor incoming traffic in an attempt to identify packets that may be part of a DoS attack * If you have a firewall, configure it to allow out only packets that originated from an IP address range inside your network. Doing so will prevent a machine from your Internal network from being used as a redirected host by a hacker in a DDoS attack. One of the by-products of these high profile attacks in the U.S. has been the involvement of law enforcement agencies such as the FBI. Although those launching DoS attacks have the luxury of hiding behind fake IP addresses, the authorities are quickly learning and adapting to the methods that hackers use. Many within these agencies believe that it will only be a matter of time before a DoS hacker is caught and prosecuted. There is also talk of legal action being taken against the ISPs, institutions, or companies from which the attacks are launched or relayed. Though it must still be proved that the attack originated from the ISP or organization, this is somewhat easier to do than pinpoint the exact address that was being used to originate the attack, or who was using the address at that time. Because you may unwittingly be the host of the attacks, you could find yourself in a lawsuit that names you as a part of the problem--another reason to examine your protection measures. As always, prevention is better than cure. If only it were that simple. In many respects, DoS does not differ from the many other Internet-spawned hacks, in that as fast as the attacks occur, new strategies and products become available to counter any new variations. One significant factor that could serve to diminish the proliferation of DoS attacks will be the implementation of the next version of TCP/IP: IPV6. The new version promises to offer a greater level of protection against threats such as DoS attacks. In the meantime, system administrators can do little but use existing measures and good practices to ensure that they become neither a victim nor an accomplice. "
Nice article but we already have couple relating to the same topics. Denail of Service (DoS) Denail of Service (DoS)