Question

a) What is the purpose of a denial-of-service attack?

b) Which programs directly attack the victim in a distributed denial-of-service attack?

c) What is a collection of compromised computers called?

d) What is the person who controls them called?

e) To what computer does the attacker send messages directly?

f) What are the implications of the fact that bots can be updated?

Answer 1

a) What is the purpose of a denial-of-service attack?

Denial-of-Service (DoS) as the name implies is a kind of attack to make the services of a computer or a network inaccessible to the authentic user.

• The attacker makes use of flooding messages or signals in the network so that the system ends up with a crash or denying the service requests by the intended users.
• DoS attackers mainly target web servers of popular organizations such as financial, governmental, media companies or other service providers so that their clients will not able to do business and companies will face problems.

b) Which programs directly attack the victim in a distributed denial-of-service attack?

The programs that directly attack the victim are called Bots

• A bot is a term used as the short name for a robot, mainly given to a computer affected by the malware program.
• in DoS attacks, there could be a single machine often connected multiple devices they trigger the flooding messages across the network using a sophisticated program.

c) What is a collection of compromised computers called?

Collection of compromised computers are called Botnets

• in DoS attacks, there could be a single machine, often connected multiple devices they trigger the flooding messages across the network using a sophisticated program.
• Collection of compromised computers are called Botnets

d) What is the person who controls them called?

The person who controls them called Botmaster

• Botmaster controls the botnet
• Botmaster is able to reprogram the botnet programs that make the bots more flexible.

e) To what computer does the attacker send messages directly?

The DoS attacker sends the message directly to the victim's compromised computer, that is the bot.

f) What are the implications of the fact that bots can be updated?

• Bots are the computers that the attacker directly communicate with.
• These bots are programmed with sophisticated programs to conduct DoS attacks
• The Botmaster is having the full authority over the bots so that he will be able to remotely reprogram the bots as he needed.
• This will help when the authorised user takes actions to prevent DoS attack the attacker will be able to take countermeasures using the remote reprogramming.
• This makes bots more flexible and they can be updated as well.