With the growth of the Internet, potentially every computer has become vulnerable to assaults. Such assaults can be particular damaging if the machine is a server. There are a number of ways in which network servers can be hijacked and damaged. Equal are the number of ways in which these attacks can be protected against. We attempt to give you a brief overview on some of the common types of attacks.
Before we get into that, let us look at who are these potentially dangerous entities who can cause damage to your machines and services. Such individuals are usually called Hackers & Crackers. Some people argue that a hacker is someone who is just a creative programmer/enthusiast without any lethal intentions. Whereas the real damagers are the Crackers who range from the professional computer criminals to the enthusiasts, whose only aim is to cause damage to the system. Whatever the case maybe, hackers and crackers both have the potential to cause a great deal of damage.
There are several techniques by which a hacker or a cracker can cause harm to your machine and data. While some may want to do it just for the sake of doing something thrilling, some may user your proprietary data for blackmailing you. All such attacks can be classified into three major types.
Denial Of Service (DOS) attack: This is the easiest way to attack a system. The chief objective of this type of an attack is to load the attacked server or machine with so many requests and it creaks under the load and is unable to service the requests of genuine users. A simple script written can send thousands of requests per second resulting in an application failure. They are as easy to protect against as they are to perpetuate.
Distributed Denial of Service attack (DOS): These are an advanced version of DOS attacks where an attacker will take control of dozens and sometimes hundreds of weakly secured computers in the Internet and use them to overload a particular server. So a remote machine would get requests from multiple sources and denying access to all the machines can be a huge task and sometimes counter productive.
Intrusion Attacks: In order to gain access of other people's computers remotely, one needs to look for openings in order to exploit such machines. This is done by scanning the target machines for various services and if a service is weakly secured then it can be used to get inside the users' machines. These types of attacks are used not only to use your machine as a shoulder to fire a gun from but also to plant adware and other programs on your machines to gain confidential information as well as studying usage patterns to tailor marketing and advertising campaigns.
Mail Bombing: This refers to the practice of sending email in such huge quantities that the user's disk quotas or hard drives become full thus preventing other mail from coming into the system.
Spam Relaying: A way in which desktop machines and servers can be misused is by using it as a relay relay. Spam as we know is the junk mail or unsolicited mail that we receive almost every hour. These spammers will take control of a user's machine and download all spam tools on the machine. Then, the program will automatically run, making it appear that your machine sent spam to everyone.
These are just some of the ways in which computers and networks can be compromised. We will discuss in later articles about ways to protect your desktop as well as server.
|
SERVICES 
site by: DWM 
