Denial-of-Service & Distributed Denial-of-Service on The Internet

Denial-of-Service and Distributed Denial-of-Service is costing the economy world-wide billions of dollars. The economy is the cornerstone of our society and its collapse will certainly change the way in which humanity exists today. The three main goals of computer security are availability, confidentiality and integrity. The focus of this paper is on attacks that compromise the availability of systems. A Denial-of-Service attack is a very serious threat to the infrastructure of the Internet, as well as its users. The Internet plays an important role in our everyday lives and many companies are dependent on it to conduct business or provide critical real-time services and cannot function when computer systems and network access go down. When a company cannot offer its services it will lose money, its reputation and ultimately clients. This in turn will impact the economy and eventually all of us. This is the major driver for network security requirements. In order to prevent these attacks from happening we need to understand what exactly the terms Denial-of-Service and Distributed Denial-of-Service mean and how they effect or impact the economy. This paper is a summary of a literature study, with regards to the causes and effects of these attacks, as well as potential solutions to the problem.