Knowledge Base

A DOS, DDOS (Denial Of Service) attack is any action that is taken in order to disrupt or effectively disable a network.

Denial of service attacks are mostly generated by many, many machines that have been exploited and then send out a ping (ICMP packet) flood to the network that they are attacking. This flood saturates the network connection and brings the network to a slowdown or complete outage in many cases.

A smurf attack is basically a Denial of service attack that is instigated using an exploit progarm called "smurf".

The exploit programs basically install themselves onto hundreds of machines and then launch the attack onto the chosen network at any given time.

It is very hard to control these attacks as you could imagine with hundreds, in some cases thousands of machines launching ping floods at the network.

That's basically what they are and what they do.