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General Security Concepts: Attacks • Chapter 2 57

■ Code and Cryptographic Attacks These include backdoors, viruses,
Trojans, worms, rootkits, software exploitation, botnets and mathematical
attacks.

Attack Methodologies in Plain English
In this section, we’ve listed network attacks, application attacks, and
Head of the Class… the list of descriptions might look overwhelming, generally the names
mixed threat attacks, and within those are included buffer overflows,
DDoS attacks, fragmentation attacks, and theft of service attacks. While

are self-explanatory. For example, consider a DoS, or denial of service
attack. As its name implies, this attack is designed to do just one thing—
render a computer or network non-functional so as to deny service to its
legitimate users. That’s it. So, a DoS could be as simple as unplugging
machines at random in a data center or as complex as organizing an army
of hacked computers to send packets to a single host in order to over-
whelm it and shut down its communications. Another term that has
caused some confusion is a mixed threat attack. This simply describes any
type of attack that is comprised of two different, smaller attacks. For
example, an attack that goes after Outlook clients and then sets up a
bootleg music server on the victim machine, is classified as a mixed threat
attack.

Active Attacks

Active attacks can be described as attacks in which the attacker is actively
attempting to cause harm to a network or system.The attacker isn’t just listening
on the wire, but is attempting to breach or shut down a service.Active attacks tend
to be very visible, because the damage caused is often very noticeable. Some of the
more well known active attacks are DoS/DDoS, buffer overflows, SYN attacks, and
Internet Protocol (IP) spoofing; these and many more are detailed in the following
section.

DoS and DDoS

To understand a DDoS attack and its consequences, you first need to grasp the
fundamentals of DoS attacks.The progression from understanding DoS to DDoS is
quite elementary, though the distinction between the two is important. Given its
name, it should not come as a surprise that a DoS attack is aimed squarely at
ensuring that the service a computing infrastructure usually delivers is negatively
affected in some way.This type of attack does not involve breaking into the target

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