A denial of service attack results when access to computer or network resource is intentionally blocked or degraded as a result of malicious action taken by another user.
These attacks do not necessarily damage data directly or permanently (although they could), but they intentionally compromise the availability of the resources.
These types of attacks tend to affect the availability of computer systems for legitimate usage. These forms of attacks can include e-mail bomb attacks, sending thousands of e-mails to a particular computer system until that system crash, the software required to carry out denial of service attacks in widely available on the internet.
Another commonly used denial of service attack is the Ping O’ Death. The Ping O’ Death can crash or reboot a computer by sending a ‘ping’ message of greater than 65,536 bytes the default size is 64 bytes. Router updates have nearly eliminated these problems.
Denial of service attacks could be very effective against an Internet based company, since they rely on on-line connectivity. These sorts of attacks could easily disrupt electronic commerce on-line mechanisms.
Direct Attack
A direct attack would take the form of hacking into computer system and rewriting or stealing information. Some recent examples have that hackers operate for political purposes.Another method of hacking is more concerned with attacking computers files and destroying, modifying or extracting data. These types of hacking attacks may be less apparent to organizations, as they may not realize they have a victim.
Cyber terrorists would use hacking as an extensive part of their ‘attack strategy’ against electronic commerce. By hacking Web sites, cyber terrorists will gain a global audience for their political message and they will also be able to discredit the security of the companies using the on-line service.
It should be remembered that hackers are available for hire on the open market and therefore their service can be easily acquired.
By actually hacking the data contained within the system, sales can be disrupted, or data altered. This would help to harm the organization’s effectiveness or allow fraud to take place.
Computer Attack
