The next attack that we're going to be talking about
is the Denial of Service attack, or sometimes the Distributed
Denial of Service attack.
And what this one really is, this
is when everybody is going to the networking
person and their team going, hey, is the internet down
because there's actually a chance that the internet might
be down.
Let's jump on a whiteboard and talk a little bit more
about what the DoS or DDoS really is.
Now, it's time to talk about one of the attacks that
makes the headlines the most because it impacts the widest
range of people, and that's the Denial of Service attack.
Now, the Denial of Service attack
comes in different shapes and sizes. WEBVTT X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:900000
comes in different shapes and sizes.
Maybe you're a small business operating
in New Orleans, Louisiana and maybe
what you do is you run a website.
Maybe that website takes sale, and lets
say you have a competitor in New York.
What I'm about to describe is a perfectly valid and real world
scenario.
Trust me, this sounds ridiculous,
but it's actually a real thing, and this is your competitor up
here in New York, and what they want for the Christmas holiday
is for your website to be offline.
So what this competitor can do is
they can actually go to something called the darknet. WEBVTT X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:900000
they can actually go to something called the darknet.
The darknet is basically the internet,
where there's no indexing done on search indexes
or anything like that.
You have to have specific software installed in order
to access the darknet, but this is
where a lot of illegal activities take place.
So our competitor goes through the steps
to get the darknet set up, they actually reach out
to a hacker who is offering their services on the darknet.
Basically, this is hacker as a service,
and they pay this hacker to do whatever
they can to take down your website for the holiday season. WEBVTT X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:900000
they can to take down your website for the holiday season.
That hacker can then launch a bunch
of different types of attacks that is designed to do nothing
more than to affect the availability of your website
or deny that service, Denial of Service, to the world.
Now, how do they actually implement
this Denial of Service?
Well, there's a bunch of different ways.
Again, it's limited to your imagination.
Maybe they do social engineering to find a way into your system,
and then encrypt it, or they dupe someone WEBVTT X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:900000
and then encrypt it, or they dupe someone
into downloading a virus.
But typically, the way a Denial of Service attack,
though, works is they're designed to overload
your server, your web server.
So this could be doing something like sending a flood of TCP SYN
requests, or HTTP requests.
Another thing that they used to do
is something called the ping of death.
This is less common nowadays because firewalls and intrusion
devices are now sophisticated enough
to detect it and report it, but the idea WEBVTT X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:900000
to detect it and report it, but the idea
was they sent in a gigantic ping, a ping that
was bigger than a packet would allow,
and it would overflow the server, which
is called the buffer overflow.
Now, the buffer overflow has more components to it.
We're going to talk about that in the next skill,
but the idea is that we overwhelmed the CPU and RAM
of this server to the point where it couldn't
respond to devices in general.
The kicker here, though, is that what we've just described
is a Denial of Service attack.
A one or two machines are trying to attack one server to bring WEBVTT X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:900000
A one or two machines are trying to attack one server to bring
down that server.
What's actually more common now is the distributed Denial
of Service attack.
So here we are.
We've got our hacker who may be--
let's pretend they're in Perth, Australia, for example.
What that hacker can actually do is deploy
a virus or worm or trojan that infects computers
all around the world.
I'm just putting dots.
These are going to represent computers
that are infected all around the world just like this,
and these infected computers are sometimes called a botnet
or sometimes they're just called zombies. WEBVTT X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:900000
or sometimes they're just called zombies.
They're interchangeable used here.
And this hacker can now advertise in the darknet,
I have a botnet around the world that's
ready to attack whatever resource you want.
So now, when the hacker wants to attack our server,
all of these computers around the world
in a coordinated effort are all going
to flood and converge upon my server
and totally overwhelm it.
What may be more likely to happen
and what certainly makes more deadlines--
maybe like Cloudflare or Google.
And all of these botnets around the world WEBVTT X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:900000
And all of these botnets around the world
attack the DNS service at once, and when global DNS goes down,
guess what?
The entire internet or at least a region of the internet
goes down and that has tremendous impacts
on the global economy, because all of a sudden, commerce
stops for an extended period of time
while all of the other services are
trying to thwart this attack.
So the idea here is that the attack itself
is distributed around the world, and that's
what makes it the distributed Denial of Service attack. WEBVTT X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:900000
what makes it the distributed Denial of Service attack.
So that sets up an availability attack, the DDoS.
I hope this has been informative for you,
and I'd like to thank you for viewing.