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Denial of Service Attacks

Criminality of Denial of Services Attack Explained

Criminality of Denial of Services Attack Explained

Denial of services attacks are carried out quite often against businesses as well as person-to-person and according to computer crime laws. Such attacks are a serious infringement on one’s right to use a computer. Although a distributed denial of service attack isn't uncommon, it is a Federal offense and can be punishable by law and considered to be a violation against one of many very serious computer crime laws. The National Information Infrastructure Protection Act of 1996 claims that a distributed denial of service attack is a Federal crime which carries with it penalties of fines and possible jail sentence time.
 
 
If you are the victim of a distributed denial of service attack while on Internet relay chat (IRC), it is recommended that you do not create hostility by fighting back. The reason for this is because a distributed denial of service attack is not in any way associated with IRC servers and because of this, computer crime laws show that the offenders and perpetrators of a distributed denial of service attack cannot be punished. The best thing to do would be to ignore them and to take steps to try to prevent yourself from having another distributed denial of attack committed against you.
 
 
If one uses malware to cause a computer system to slow down, this is also considered to be a Federal offense, and therefore, might give you, the victim, some grounds to pursue prosecution under computer crime laws. However, according to computer crime laws, it is not illegal in the United States to possess malware.
 
 
In order to prevent having one of many computer crime laws violated against you, it is important to install anti-virus software (this will help prevent malware from infecting your computer, which is another form of a distributed denial of service attack that will slow down or cause serious harm to your computer), refrain from giving out your e-mail information too often (as spam mail can often be contaminated), or install a firewall to prevent unknown or harmful viruses from entering your computer.

Facts About Denial of Service Attacks

Facts About Denial of Service Attacks

A denial of service attack is a specific violation of computer crime law. A denial of service is also known as a DoS attack. In a denial of service attack, a hacker will use a computer to bombard another site in an attempt to make the use of a particular computer or website more difficult, if not in fact impossible. A denial of service attack may be the sole computer crime law that a hacker may attempt to perform during a denial of service attack, but a denial of service attack may instead be used to conceal another computer crime law violation, such as computer fraud, identity theft, or phishing attempts to acquire personal information.
Often the computer crime law that is violated during a denial of service attack involves the use of a specific type of spam. While spam is usually considered to exclusively happen through e-mail, a hacker is also able to spam a particular website with a series of information requests. These spammed information requests are also known as pings. These types of pings, as is the case with spam e-mail, involve the perversion of perfectly valid and legal techniques in an attempt to violate a computer crime law.
A denial of service attack may be performed by a particular, individual hacker, or may be carried out by several different hackers working in connection with each other. The violation of computer crime law may involve a denial of service attack performed by a single computer, or by a series of computers that have been infected by malware, or malicious software. A computer that has been infected by malware may contain code that allows the hacker to directly control another person’s computer in order to execute a DoS, or denial of service attack in an attempt to bring down a particular website.
However, a denial of service attack is not always intended to be a violation of computer crime law. Sometimes, a company will hire individuals who have been engaged in hacking in the past to attempt to launch a denial of service attack against a specific website which they run in order to perform a stress test on the website to see how many requests for information the website would be able to handle before crashing. A denial of service attack is closely related to when a website becomes unavailable because too many people are attempting to access a particular website.
A denial of service is a violation of computer crime law, but a website crashing because it is visited by too many people for the website server to handle does not violate computer crime law because of the intent of the person to set off the flurry of visits to a website. An article on a website which links to an interesting website and results in the second website crashing has not violated computer crime law because the first website did not intend to cause the second site to become unavailable. In contrast, a website that organizes a denial of service attack does so with the intention of causing the second website to crash.

Foms of Denial of Service Attack

Foms of Denial of Service Attack

Many see the usage of a Denial of Service Attack (more commonly known as "DoS Attack) against someone or against an entity as a form of cyberterrorism and as a prime example of computer crime cases. It is a hostile attack, and in all computer crime cases the attacks use computers as well as the Internet in order to send an aggressive message.
 
 
A DoS Attack is commonly used to slow down computer systems as well as the Internet and interrupt or destroy communication between networks, which causes problems for businesses as well as for personal computer users. Many computer crime cases are considered to be Federal offenses punishable by law.
 
 
There are many different forms of a Denial of Service Attack which include teardrop attacks, ICMP Flood Attacks, peer-to-peer attacks, permanent denial of services attacks, nukes, distributed attacks, degradation of services attacks, blind denial of services, denial of service level ll, unintentional denial of services, and application level floods.
 
 
The most common form of attack is the ICMP flood attack. This is performed when the attacker decides to "flood" an overwhelming amount of information at one time to one network causing it to stall and time out.
 
 
A Denial of Service Attack is normally carried out as a personal vendetta against a person or business for personal or financial gain, or just to cause inconvenience to another party. An example of just one of many computer crime cases took place in June 2009 when the "Pirate Bay" website suffered a Denial of Service Attack. No one could get onto the site and many felt that it was a vicious Denial of Service Attack due to the fact that many fans believed that the website had "sold out" to an international gaming corporation. This was one of the most popular international computer crime cases.
 
 
Although there is nothing that can be done to guarantee that you will not be attacked, several courses of action can be taken so that you are less likely to become a target or victim in such computer crime cases. The following steps may help to prevent falling victim to a Denial of Service Attack: install a firewall, install anti-virus software, and do not be too liberal about giving out your e-mail address or personal information over the computer (this will help reduce spam mail which can contain harmful malware).