Defenses Against Distributed Denial of Service Attacks
by Gary Kessler

Abstract:

This short paper discusses defenses against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. DoS attacks are of particular interest and concern to the Internet community because they seek to render target systems inoperable and/or target networks inaccessible. "Traditional" DoS attacks, however, typically generate a large amount of traffic from a given host or subnet and it is possible for a site to detect such an attack in progress and defend themselves. Distributed DoS attacks are a much more nefarious extension of DoS attacks because they are designed as a coordinated attack from many sources simultaneously against one or more targets. 

This paper will focus on DDoS attacks only and assumes some basic familiarity with different DoS attacks. Rather than describe specific DDoS attacks in detail, this paper will define generic DDoS terms and ways in which service providers and user sites can defend themselves against these attacks.

This article is reproduced courtesy of our partner, Gary Kessler.

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