Posted: June 4th, 2022

Cyber-Attacks: DDoS and Buffer Overflow

Cyber-Attacks
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Cyber-Attacks: DDoS and Buffer Overflow
Cyber-attacks are more than common these days; hence the ever-growing need to gain skills that can help one understand the different types of attacks. For a technician to distinguish between the various attacks, they have to know particular attributes for each type. This helps with ease in identification that can lead to appropriate decision-making skills when choosing a countermeasure.
1. DDoS Attack
DDoS has two essential attributes. First, they come in the form of short attacks, and second, they are mostly under 1Gbps (Jonker, Sperotto, & Pras, 2020). Since they do not last longer than five minutes, it is easy for the attack to evade detection. It becomes hard for IT security to catch each DDoS attack within the network due to their short volume and duration (Jonker, Sperotto, & Pras, 2020). A DDoS attack is known to shut down infrastructure or device functions, making it inaccessible to its users. The traffic is normally flooded with information making it useless. A simpler example is a traffic jam that clogs up the road, preventing regular vehicles from joining the highway and proceeding to their destination. DDoS attacks cripple the computer architecture and devices such that there is no progress.
While an IDS only records and logs attacks, an IPS is expected to do the rest. An IPS is a network security technique that functions by detecting and mitigating threats on the network. This way, identified threats such as DDoS and buffer Overflow attacks will be minimized. As much as technology has improved business revenues, it also poses attacks to the same companies that benefit from it. An example of a DDoS attack occurred in February of 2018: 2024 – Write My Essay For Me | Essay Writing Service For Your Papers Online, targeting GitHub (Felter, 2019: 2024 – Online Assignment Homework Writing Help Service By Expert Research Writers). For about 20minutes, GitHub systems were down. Considering millions of users depend on GitHub to manage their code online, the threat was likely to affect many organizations if it lasted any longer. GitHub is said to have faced a record-breaking DDoS of 1.3 Tbps. Each second saw 126.9 million packets of data being sent to the servers. Luckily, the company was able to use a DDoS mitigation service to resolve the issue.
Countermeasures by the IT security manager are vital as they enable the whole team to know how to respond in the event of an attack. Having a detailed set of actions for the security team beforehand allows one to determine how fast the company can fight off an attacker. In some cases, it is reasonable that a contact list is created to determine internal and external people/firms that should be informed in an attack (Dobrana, 2018: 2024 – Write My Essay For Me | Essay Writing Service For Your Papers Online). Together with technical approaches, these measures will form a holistic approach to detect and prevent the system from an attack.

2. Buffer Overflow Attack
Buffer overflows are attributed to taking more than the allocated space in the buffer memory. When the designated memory location is full, the attacks move to the adjacent locations (Zhao, Huang, Pan, & Hui, 2020). Both DDoS and Buffer Overflow is overwhelming attacks that can affect their victims once they penetrate the system. Based on these attributes, one should understand the extreme repercussions offered by DDoS and buffer overflow attacks to arrive at countermeasures that can aid their company.
The effects of Buffer Overflow attacks are adverse and can cause damage to the computer infrastructure. Buffer overflows are an example of DDoS attacks, but they work through the flooding technique where the memory spaces experience more data than it can handle. This causes the infrastructure programs to generate incorrect results, behave unpredictably, crash, or cause memory access errors. With a Buffer Overflow, the memory is constantly overwritten hence affecting the infrastructure.
Countermeasures are necessary to help organizations or individuals detect and prevent their networks from cyberattacks. Since these two attacks are almost similar, the countermeasures are not far apart. Non-required services should be disabled while firewalls are installed to filter the addresses, packets, and ports. Firewalls are essential to determine what is allowed through the network. Intrusion-based Prevention Systems (IPS) and Intrusion Detection Systems are also necessary for detection and prevention (Petters, 2020).
The Morris Worm is the most popular buffer overflow attack as it targeted 20% of the Internet. For two years, 1998-1990, the attack infected over sixty thousand machines. It cost $200-$53,000 per location to resolve the issue. Some of the strategies involved isolating some of the infected machines that kept on being re-infected. A cybersecurity manager needs to have strategies that enable him/her to prepare and approach the attacks effectively. It is essential to ensure that a system checklist is developed, a response team is formed, and notification and escalation procedures are defined.

Overall, cyberattacks are a common anomaly that most network architectures and devices face today. DDoS and Buffer overflow are two attacks that occur regularly and will most likely torment unaware organizations. While these attacks do not steal information from the network, they cost their targets a great deal of time and money. Taking the necessary precautions is necessary to avoid long downtimes hence consumer grievances. Acquiring IDS and IPS systems is a reliable option since IT security cannot be held accountable for not catching every packet on the network. Besides the technical, logical approaches used by IT managers can aid equip the company with a clear strategy to follow in the event of an attack.
References
Dobran, B. (2018: 2024 – Write My Essay For Me | Essay Writing Service For Your Papers Online). 7 Tactics to Prevent DDoS Attacks and Keep Your Website Safe. Retrieved from https://phoenixnap.com/blog/prevent-ddos-attacks
Felter, B. (2019: 2024 – Online Assignment Homework Writing Help Service By Expert Research Writers). 5 of the most Famous Recent DDoS Attacks. Retrieved from https://www.vxchnge.com/blog/recent-ddos-attacks-on-companies
Jonker, M., Sperotto, A., & Pras, A. (2020, April). DDoS Mitigation: A Measurement-Based Approach. In NOMS 2020-2020 IEEE/IFIP Network Operations and Management Symposium (pp. 1-6). IEEE.
Petters, J. (2020). IDS v. IPS: What is the Difference? Retrieved from https://www.varonis.com/blog/ids-vs-ips/
Zhao, X., Huang, S., Pan, Z., & Hui, H. (2020, June). Buffer Overflow Vulnerability Detection Based on Unsafe Function Invocation. In Journal of Physics: Conference Series (Vol. 1549, No. 2, p. 022064). IOP Publishing.

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