Denial of Service: A Growing Underrated Threat
Will Bonasera, Md Minhaz Chowdhury, Shadman Latif
Abstract
In the modern Internet age the use of networking for resources and services has become routine in everyone's daily life. Whether it is accessing one's social media, online banking, using cloud-based applications, or even simply resolving host names through DNS, relying on another company's resources has become the norm. However, when an attacker restricts our access to these resources through a Denial-of-Service attack, it not only affects our daily life, but affects the business providing the resources. While DoS prevention services exist, the size and frequency of these attacks is increasing every year. This paper addresses the issue of DoS and DDoS attacks, presents examples of major attacks, and presents how the Internet of Things is making these attacks worse. The first goal of this paper is to emphasize on the growing risk of Denial-of-Service attacks and to present how different types of attacks can be and were used against a business network and operations. The second goal is to present how these attacks can be performed with ease and how the Internet of Things is playing a major role in these attacks. The result of the study is a suggestion of two approaches to take against these attacks: mitigating amplification attacks and hardening IoT devices.