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Showing posts from June, 2013

Denial of Service (DoS) and Brute-Force Protection

Recently it has become clear to me that, although the terms Denial of Service (DoS), Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) and Brute-Force are used by many, people don't really understand them. This has caused confusion and problems on more than one project, so I thought I would write my thoughts on their similarities, differences and protection mechanisms. A Denial of Service is anything that happens (usually on purpose, but not necessarily) that takes a service off line or makes it unavailable to legitimate users. This could range from a hacker exploiting a vulnerability and taking the service off line, to someone digging up a cable in the road. However, a Denial of Service could also be triggered by legitimate use of a service without any 'vulnerabilities'. Consider a service that performs operations on large sets of data that take a few seconds to complete. If I put in multiple requests for this service then I could tie it up and make it unresponsive for several minute