Internet Denial of Service: Attack and Defense Mechanisms

Suddenly your Web server becomes unavailable. When you investigate, you realize that a flood of packets is surging into your network. You have just become one of the hundreds of thousands of victims of a denial-of-service attack, a pervasive and growing threat to the Internet. What do you do?

Internet Denial of Service sheds light on a complex and fascinating form of computer attack that impacts the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of millions of computers worldwide. It tells the network administrator, corporate CTO, incident responder, and student how DDoS attacks are prepared and executed, how to think about DDoS, and how to arrange computer and network defenses. It also provides a suite of actions that can be taken before, during, and after an attack.

Inside, you'll find comprehensive information on the following topics

• How denial-of-service attacks are waged
• How to improve your network's resilience to denial-of-service attacks
• What to do when you are involved in a denial-of-service attack
• The laws that apply to these attacks and their implications
• How often denial-of-service attacks occur, how strong they are, and the kinds of damage they can cause
• Real examples of denial-of-service attacks as experienced by the attacker, victim, and unwitting accomplices

The authors' extensive experience in handling denial-of-service attacks and researching defense approaches is laid out clearly in practical, detailed terms.

Jelena Mirkovic has been an assistant professor at the University of Delaware since 2003. She holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Los Angeles, where she developed effective defenses against distributed denial-of-service attacks.

Sven Dietrich is a member of the technical staff at the CERT Coordination Center, part of the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, and is affiliated with Carnegie Mellon CyLab, a university-wide cyber security research and education initiative. He has worked and published on DDoS since 1999.

David Dittrich is a senior security engineer at the University of Washington s Center for Information Assurance and Cybersecurity and a founding member of the Honeynet Project. He published the first detailed technical analyses of DDoS tools in 1999, and maintains the largest Web page on the subject.

Peter Reiher is an adjunct associate professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research includes defenses against denial-of-service attacks.