Smurf, Fraggle, and Teardrop Attacks: An Overview of Common DoS Techniques

The denial of service (DoS) attack is statistically the most used malicious attack out of them all. This stems from the ease of use of the attack, as well as the alarming lethality. Literally anyone can bring down a website with a simple command prompt. The question is- how do you protect against an attack that can cripple your network or website in a matter of minutes? Types of Denial of Service (DoS) Attack If you are going to protect against an attack, you first have to know how it works. You must familiarize yourself with the different variations, methods, and plans of attacks that hackers use. Surprisingly, there are at least seven different classifications of denial of service (DoS) attacks known today. Ping Flood The most basic of attacks is the ping flood attack. It relies on the ICMP echo command, more popularly known as ping . In legitimate situations the ping command is used by network administrators to test connectivity between two computers. In the ping flood attack, it is used to flood large amounts of data packets to the victim’s computer in an attempt to overload it.