Common attacks

If you are going to gain the CompTIA Security+ qualification, you need to know the different types of attacks that you may encounter; there are numerous attacks and you need to know each of these, their characteristics, and how they can be prevented. Let's look at each of these in turn.

Application/service attacks

• Denial of Service Attack (DoS): A denial of service attack is where the victim is flooded with a high volume of requests from another host so that it is not available for any other hosts to use. A common method of this is SYN flood attacks where the first two parts of a three handshake occur and the victim is holding a session waiting for the ACK that never comes.

Note

A SYN flood attack is where only the first two parts of the three-way handshake have taken place, leaving your computer is a state of limbo. DDoS has a high volume of these.

• Distributed Denial of Service Attacks (DDoS): A DDDoS attack is where a botnet is set up to flood a victim with an enormous amount...