THREE GENERATIONS OF DOS ATTACKS - ACCESS DENIED

Three Generations of DoS Attacks - ACCESS DENIED

What is a DoS attack and why should I care?

I bet most of you have heard of DoS attacks but how many of you actually know what they are?  Well, DoS stands for “Denial-of-Service” and these attacks “attempt to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users, such as to temporarily or indefinitely interrupt or suspend services of a host connected to the Internet” (Wikipedia). Likewise, a DDoS (Distributed Denial-of-Service) is when they target more than one unique IP address.

From its description I think it’s pretty obvious why you should care about DoS attacks (i.e., service is life!), but here are some pretty high-profile examples anyway. 4chan’s “Anonymous” hacktavist/vigilante collective is a great example. In 2008 they launched Project Chanology which targeted the Church of Scientology for its “attempts to remove material from a highly publicized interview with

Scientologist Tom Cruise from the Internet in January” (Wikipedia).  Anonymous pledged to “expel the church from the Internet” and began a series of DoS attacks against the Scientology website. They also overwhelmed Scientology centers with prank calls and black faxes. Anonymous successfully “render[ed] major Scientology websites inaccessible and leak[ed] documents allegedly stolen from Scientology computers” (Wikipedia).

The Jester (aka, th3j35t3r in leetspeak) is another computer hacktavist/vigilante that uses DoS attacks. He works alone, claims to be ex-military, and is patriotic to a fault. He was first noticed for a series of DoS attacks on Jihadist websites that shut them down for brief periods. He also brought down Wikileaks single-handedly for over a day, and after that he battled Anonymous. He claims to have trojaned a tool the Anons downloaded and now claims to “pwn” Anon insiders. He also took down 4 websites of the Westboro Church for 8 weeks and did it all from a single 3G cell phone!

 So… are you ready for a (D)DoS attack?