What is a Denial of Service Attack?
DoS Attacks Cripple Computers and Cause Billions in Damage
Aug 6, 2009
A Denial of Service attack, or DoS for short, is an attempt to shut down or seriously impair the ability of a website's servers to operate. This can be many variants of these attacks, but the main purpose is always the same - to wreak havoc on as many computers as possible
A History of Denial of Service Attacks
The very first DoS attack was the Morris Worm, 99 lines of code written by Robert Morris, a Cornell University Computer Science graduate student. The worm caused over 5000 computers to be out of service for several hours.
In March of 1998, a DoS attacked was launched against a number of U.S. government and university serviers.
Melissa, the first email virus, launched in 1999 by David Smith, affected a million users and caused $80 million in damages.
The Love Bug virus in May, 2000 spread quickly across the internet, crippling U.S. Congress, White House and Pentagon systems. It affected approximately 80 percent of businesses in Australia and the U.S.
The Code Red virus, in July 2001, at its peak affected 2,000 machines every minute, infected 359,000 machines, and cost 1.2 billion dollars.
Bugbear (also known as Tanatos), launched in October 2002, infected 320,000 emails in its first week. It disappeared, and reappeared in 2003 as Bugbear B moving at three times the speed, taking advantage of a flaw in Microsoft Outlook that automatically opened email attachments.
The Denial of Service Attack Bill Gates Put a Bounty On
The Blaster Worm, launched in August of 2003 spread quickly through Microsoft XP, Windows NT 4.0 and Windows Server 2003 servers. It launched a DoS attack on Microsoft's update web site, which Microsoft thwarted. Microsoft offered a $250,000 reward for information leading to the the arrest of Blaster's creator, and 3 individuals were arrested for allegedly unleashing variants of the worm, but its original creator was never caught.
Why Hackers Launch Denial of Service Attacks
There have been numerous other attacks since 2003, and the Twitter DoS attack is not the first it has experienced. As long as there is an internet, there will be sick people out there trying to see how much damage they can do. All we can do is try to come up with software to guard against them, but a new piece of software to be exploited is a hacker's dream. They live to prove they are smarter and better than the creators of any software, and can tear it and the network it's on to pieces.
The wholesale raping of networks is what turns these people on. What will stop them? No one knows, but programmers keep trying to come up with better protective software and plug all the holes in the existing software, so as to thwart those whose only purpose is to cause harm.
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