Overview of Common Attacks and Exploits

This section reviews some of the more commonly used attacks and exploits available to attackers. It should by no means be considered complete because new attacks are discovered at an alarming rate every day. For a more complete list or more information on the exploits listed here, refer to any of the organizations presented in the previous section:

• Denial of service (DoS): A DoS attack attempts to force the target into a failure condition, thereby denying its services to others. There are several ways in which a failure condition can be induced, such as flooding the target with attempts to connect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial-of-service_attack).

• Distributed denial of service (DDoS): This type of attack uses a collection of unknowing accomplices to attack a target from multiple locations at once. The accomplices are compromised machines spread out in many different places.