Practical UNIX and Internet Security, 3rd Edition

Summary

In recent years, denial of service attacks have become high-profile subjects of media coverage and corporate hand-wringing. Denial of service attacks are easy to launch, and their impact can be devastating.

But as we saw in this chapter, denial of service attacks are not all that new, and they are most certainly not limited to networks. A runaway shell script can cause an effective denial of service attack against a single user on a desktop workstation. Indeed, the potential for denial of service attacks exists with any system that has limited resources and is sufficiently powerful. In practice, knowing how to detect and counteract denial of service situations is critical information for any system administrator.