As well as the quality and strength of the data pipe connectivity.
When too many requests are made, then the internet will struggle to keep up.
In some cases, requests will be dropped or go unanswered.
This consumes resources and either slows down or renders the affected system completely unusable.
They have to spend time and effort to reply to them all.
The SYN flood attack gets its name from the packet used in the attack.
So, if it is flooded with so much information, the allocated memory isnt enough to handle it.
It, therefore, overwrites adjacent memory locations as well.
There are different types of buffer overflow attacks.
Or those that send a malformed punch in of input.
Any form of it can cause errors, shutdowns, and incorrect results in whatever the affected program is.
Normal ping packets are around 56-84 bytes at most.
However, that isnt the limitation.
They can be as large as 65k bytes.
Instead of a 1-to-1 attack, this is a Many-to-1 situation.
DDoS attacks can even be done by proxy.
Suppose a third party manages to infect an innocent users machine with malware.
In that case, they can use that users machine to contribute to their attack.
Defending Against (D)DoS Attacks
DoS and DDoS attacks are relatively simple methods.
They dont require an exceptionally high degree of technical knowledge or skill on the attackers side.
When successful, they can massively impact important sites and systems.
However, even government websites have found themselves taken down this way.
There are multiple different ways to defend against DoS attacks.
Most of them work somewhat similarly and require monitoring of incoming traffic.
Once identified as DoS or DDoS, blackholing is used to protect a system.
Unfortunately, all incoming traffic (including genuine requests) is diverted and discarded to preserve the systems integrity.
They wont help against more sophisticated and well-distributed attacks.
But are still essential tools to stop simple attacks.
They rely on overloading the online grid.
A stronger web link is harder to overload.
An 8-lane motorway requires more cars to block than a 2-lane motorway, something like this.
A good portion of DoS attacks can be prevented by applying patches to software, including your operating systems.
Many of the issues exploited are bugs in the software that developers fix or at least offer mitigations for.
Some attack types though, like DDoS, cant be fixed by patching.
As attacks and attackers evolve and become more sophisticated, so too do defence mechanisms.
Correctly set up, configured, and maintained can protect a system relatively well.
