A Comprehensive Survey Report on Distributed Denial of Service(DDoS) Attacks and Possible Defense Mechanisms

Abstract

In the last decade of advances in internetwork technology, users are more convenient to obtain online services such as trading, gaming, etc.  Due to advancement in internet technology, internet resources and services now can be used in both remotely and in a distributed environment. Attackers make use of above environment and perform various attacks on resources and services of networks. A Denial of Service (DoS) attack denies the access of other legitimate users to shared services or resources where as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attackers usually use multiple distributed computer resources to launch a coordinated DoS attack against one or more targets.

A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is an attack in which multiple compromised computer systems attack a target, such as a server, website or other network resource, and cause a denial of service for users of the targeted resource. The flood of incoming messages, connection requests or malformed packets to the target system forces it to slow down or even crash and shut down, thereby denying service to legitimate users or systems. DDoS attacks have been carried out by diverse threat actors, ranging from individual criminal hackers to organized crime rings and government agencies. In certain situations, often ones related to poor coding, missing patches or generally unstable systems, even legitimate requests to target systems can result in DDoS-like results.