Types of Network Attacks Essay Example for Free

Types of Network Attacks Essay A Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack is mounted with the objective of causing a negative impact on the performance of a computer or network. It is also known as network saturation attack or bandwidth consumption attack. Attackers make DoS attacks by sending a large number of protocol packets to a network. The problems caused by a DoS attack are as follows: * Saturate network resources. * Disrupt connections between two computers, thereby preventing communications between services. Disrupt services to a specific computer. Man-in-the-middle : Man-in-the-middle attacks occur when an attacker successfully inserts an intermediary software or program between two communicating hosts. The intermediary software or program allows attackers to listen to and modify the communication packets passing between the two hosts. The software intercepts the communication packets and then sends the information to the receiving host. The receiving host responds to the software, presuming it to be the legitimate client. Replay Attack : A replay attack is a type of attack in which attackers capture packets containing passwords or digital signatures whenever packets pass between two hosts on a network. In an attempt to obtain an authenticated connection, the attackers then resend the captured packet to the system. In this type of attack, the attacker does not know the actual password, but can simply replay the captured packet. Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) : In the distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack, an attacker uses multiple computers throughout the network that it has previously infected. Such computers act as zombies and work together to send out bogus messages, thereby increasing the amount of phony traffic. The major advantages to an attacker of using a distributed denial-of-service attack are that multiple machines can generate more attack traffic than one machine, multiple attack machines are harder to turn off than one attack machine, and that the behavior of each attack machine can be stealthier, making it harder to track down and shut down. TFN, TRIN00, etc. are tools used for the DDoS attack.