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Curbing DOS Attacks

DOS attacks, also known as denial of service attacks, are an information warfare concept that tries to cripple a running system or a web application on the internet by using a horde or fleet of slaved computers that have malware installed to send a lot of requests for information to the system. The attacker will usually work on the first phase of the attack by taking control of several idle systems that are online but are poorly configured in terms of their security and once these are attacked, they get malware installed on them for better remote commandeering of the system.

With the remote controlled fleet of infected computers, the party that is running and carrying out the attack will simply direct all the computers to the servers of the party they intend to mete a DOS attack on. All this traffic directed at these systems means that the resources that are on the servers will be overwhelmed with the resources and as a result, they will often shut down or even become unresponsive. In this duration, any other party that is trying to gain entry into the services will not be able to as there will be too many requests that are waiting for a response.

The DOS attack locks out genuine users of the information system for a time and until the firewall has learnt the patterns of the incoming requests which are not genuine, the system will be slow. Curbing the DOS attacks means getting rid of the incessant requests coming in from the unknown parties and only accepting the requests that are from genuine parties. This means that whenever there is an influx of incoming requests, the system should be able to stop operating for a while and even ignore these requests until a moment when they are reasonably numbered and can be attended to without slowing down the system applications that are responsible for keeping the users up to date.

Another way of curbing the DOS attacks is by making use of a honeypot application which redirects all the suspicious requests to a system that keeps them in a loop and does not send back a response to the senders. This is a simple way to ensure that the influx of requests gets handled and the genuine users and customers of the information system get to access the information they require and have their requests handled in the proper manner. Also, the performance of the system should be stable enough once the unwanted traffic has been redirected and this means that service provision will not have been impacted by the denial of services attack.

In conclusion, there are a lot of denials of service attacks that take place on modern systems and for the system administrators, there are means and ways in which the system can still survive the DOS attacks. This is by way of redirecting the traffic and locking out the suspicious addresses that have a pattern of sending too many requests for the system to stop performing or come to a halt. Service disruptions are prevented in this way for the normal continuity of the businesses.