Denial of service (DoS) attacks are the insidious enemy of many enterprises.  These attacks, which attempt to disrupt legitimate use of an organization’s website or other network resources, use brute force to simply use all of a server or network’s available capacity, leaving none for legitimate users.  They are also difficult to protect against, as it is hard to distinguish requests that are part of the attack from those of legitimate users.

IT professionals have three tools at their disposal when it comes to defending against denial of service attacks: working with Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to block attacks before they reach the target network, filtering them at the network border and deploying sufficient capacity to simply absorb the attack.  In this article, we look at the use and effectiveness of each of these three strategies.

Read more : Defending Against Denial of Service Attacks

Originally published in BizTech Magazine, Feb 28, 2013