Attack Technique
Denial of Service (DoS)
A DoS (Denial of Service) attack is a cyber assault aimed at overwhelming a network, service, or system to make it unavailable to legitimate users.
Definition
What is a Denial of Service (DoS)?
A Denial of Service (DoS) attack is a type of cyber attack aimed at making a network, service, or system unavailable to its intended users. It typically involves overwhelming the target with an excessive amount of requests, depleting its resources, or exploiting software vulnerabilities to crash or severely slow down the service. This prevents legitimate users, such as SOC teams or end-users, from accessing the targeted resources, resulting in downtime, disrupted operations, and potential financial or reputational losses.
In a more advanced variation, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks involve multiple compromised devices (often called a botnet) working in unison to amplify the attack's volume, making it more challenging to mitigate and trace back to a single source. These attacks can target specific applications, network layers, or exhaust entire bandwidth capacities.
In the face of such attacks, robust network monitoring, rate limiting, and anomaly detection are essential. The Vectra AI Platform enhances DoS defenses by continuously analyzing network traffic patterns and leveraging AI-driven insights to identify and mitigate these threats in real-time.
How it works
How does a DoS attack work?
A DoS (Denial of Service) attack works by flooding a target with superfluous requests, manipulating its resources, or exploiting vulnerabilities to render it unavailable or slow to legitimate users. Here’s a breakdown of how common types of DoS attacks work:
1. Traffic Flooding
The attacker sends an overwhelming volume of traffic—typically through multiple sources or bots—to the target system. This traffic consumes network bandwidth or exhausts server resources, leading to degraded performance or complete unavailability for users. DDoS (Distributed DoS) attacks use this technique at scale by leveraging a network of compromised devices, or botnets.
2. Resource Exhaustion
Some DoS attacks focus on exhausting specific server resources, like CPU, memory, or storage. By sending complex or malformed requests, attackers can cause the system to work overtime processing these requests, leaving fewer resources available for legitimate use.
3. Vulnerability Exploitation
In some DoS attacks, attackers exploit known software vulnerabilities in applications, servers, or network protocols. For example, an attacker might send a sequence of commands or malformed packets that causes a server to crash or become unresponsive.
4. Application-Layer Attacks
These target the application layer, sending high volumes of requests to specific applications (e.g., a website login page or API) that are harder to detect since they mimic legitimate user traffic. However, by overloading a specific service or endpoint, attackers can make it unavailable for real users.
Each method ultimately aims to disrupt the target's normal operations, which is why proactive network monitoring, rate limiting, and anomaly detection are critical for defense. Security solutions like the Vectra AI Platform enhance defenses by identifying these anomalous behaviors early, allowing for real-time mitigation before an attack results in significant impact.
Why attackers use it
Why attackers use DoS attacks
Attackers use DoS (Denial of Service) attacks for various motives, including:
- Disruption and Financial Impact: DoS attacks can disrupt business operations, cause financial loss, and damage the reputation of organizations. This is particularly harmful to businesses that rely on continuous online availability, such as e-commerce sites, financial institutions, or gaming platforms.
- Extortion: Attackers may threaten a DoS attack (or initiate a brief attack as a "demonstration") to demand a ransom in exchange for stopping or preventing a prolonged attack. This tactic, called "ransom DoS" or RDoS, is a form of cyber extortion.
- Competitor Sabotage: In some cases, DoS attacks are used as a method of undermining competitors by creating service outages or degrading service quality, often leading to customer frustration and loss of trust.
- Political or Ideological Motives: Hacktivist groups may use DoS attacks as a tool for protest or to draw attention to political causes by targeting government, corporate, or other high-profile sites.
- Testing Defenses: Some attackers use DoS as a way to probe and analyze a target's defenses, testing response times, mitigation tactics, and finding potential vulnerabilities for future, more severe attacks.
- Distraction: Attackers may use a DoS attack as a distraction to divert security teams while they attempt other cyber attacks, such as data theft or network intrusion, making it harder for defenders to respond to both threats simultaneously.
For these reasons, DoS attacks represent a multifaceted threat, and defense mechanisms such as those provided by the Vectra AI Platform, which offers real-time traffic analysis and detection of attack patterns, are essential for a strong cybersecurity posture.
Platform Detections
How to detect DoS attacks
Even as attackers attempt to mask the high volume traffic patterns of DoS attacks, their activity inevitably disrupts normal network traffic flow, making it detectable through advanced AI-driven analysis.
Vectra AI offers dedicated detections for DoS, identifying SYN floods, Slowloris, and other DoS signatures by closely analyzing traffic patterns and frequency. Through sophisticated network traffic metadata analysis, Vectra AI pinpoints unusual spikes and resource usage that signal potential DoS attempts. By capturing these rapid, atypical traffic patterns, Vectra AI enables a proactive response, helping to ensure service availability and preventing attackers from disrupting your critical operations.
