Wikipedia defines DoS as “A denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) or distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack) is an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users. Although the means to carry out, motives for, and targets of a DoS attack may vary, it generally consists of the concerted efforts of a person or people to prevent an Internet site or service from functioning efficiently or at all, temporarily or indefinitely.”
There are several ways of implementing the denial of service such as smurf attacks, teardrop attacks, peer to peer attacks, application level floods, nukes, distributed attacks and so on. All these are various methods of causing harm to the already smoothly functioning website. out of all these methods, smurf attacks is used very commonly, it is a technically known as ICMP floods as well which includes ping floods.
The finest example of DoS was witness recently on Twitter and facebook. On last Thursday both these sites were so much overloaded with fake id’s that it didn’t allow the genuine members of the website to log in to their accounts. Eventually, the site had to shut down for few hours due to the issue of Denial of Service attack.
