IT expert: Attacks to make the service unavailable are caused by overloading

For example, an attacker overloads the target infrastructure with an extreme amount of requests, which becomes unavailable. IT specialist of Aliter Technologies Michal Srnec stated this for TASR. The National Security Authority (NSA) has warned against attacks of this type in recent days.

“Attacks aimed at disabling the service or DoS/DdoS attacks are based on the principle of denying or disabling the service itself. In this case, the attacker overloads the target infrastructure with the help of various vulnerabilities or with the help of an extreme amount of requests, which makes it unavailable to the end customer,” explained Srnec.

According to him, the very unavailability can create unexpected states or reactions that the attacker can exploit for further attacks. He reminded that most often the motivation of the attackers is simply to shut down the service.

According to the expert, one of the options for defending against these attacks is the use of monitoring tools and detection mechanisms that are placed in front of the target infrastructure. “Such tools can then detect the attack itself and eliminate a significant part of it by not forwarding it to the target infrastructure,” he added. According to him, even the monitoring tools themselves have physical limits, and therefore there is no 100% protection against large-scale distributed DoS attacks.

On Thursday (October 6), the NSA warned against coordinated cyber attacks in Slovakia, which are behind the Russian group anonymous.ru. The attacks were carried out using the method of disabling the service. The NSA identified the websites of several banks, offices and smaller commercial entities as targets.