An attack that attempts to make a computer or servers resource unavailable
Flood Attack
Attempts to send more packets to a server than what it can handle
Protection: Flood Guards, Timeout, IDS
Ping Flood
Server is sent too many ping (ICMP echo) packets
SYN Flood
Attacker initiates multiple TCP sessions but never completes the three-way handshake
Permanent Denial of Service (PDoS)
An attack which exploits a security flaw by re-flashing the firmware, permanently breaking the networking device
Fork Bomb
A large number of processes is created to use up a computers available processing power
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS)
Many machines are used to launch an attack against a single server to cause denial of service condition
DNS Amplification Attack
Allows attacker to initiate DNS requests from a spoofed IP address to flood a website
Prevention Measures
Blackhole/Sinkhole
Send the traffic from the attacker to non-existent IP addresses
IPS (Intrusion Prevention System)
Can detect small scale attacks and stop them
Elastic Cloud Infrastructure
Scale-up resources based on the traffic