2022-07-19 20:53:14
Educational Post:
What Is a DoS Attack?
In short, a DoS attack (or Denial-of-Service attack) is a method used to disrupt legitimate users' access to a target network or web resource. Typically, this is accomplished by overloading the target (often a web server) with a massive amount of traffic - or by sending malicious requests that cause the target resource to malfunction or crash entirely.
The first documented case of a Denial-of-Service attack was in February of 2000 when a 15-year old Canadian hacker targeted Amazon and eBay web servers with such an attack. Since then, more and more people have utilized DoS attacks to disrupt targets in many industries.
DoS vs DDoS attacks
Another similar term that you’re likely to encounter is a DDoS attack, which stands for a Distributed Denial-of-Service attack. The difference between a Dos and a DDoS attack is that during a DDoS attack, many malicious machines are directed to target a single resource. A Distributed Denial-of-Service attack is far more likely to be successful in disrupting the target than a DoS attack originating from a single source. Bad actors also tend to prefer this method as it becomes increasingly difficult to trace the attack back to its source since the attack originates from multiple points.
As cryptocurrencies have picked up traction in recent years, crypto exchanges have become increasingly popular targets for DDoS attacks. For example, when the cryptocurrency Bitcoin Gold officially launched, it immediately became the target of a massive DDoS attack that ended up disrupting their website for multiple hours.
The Proof of Work consensus algorithm ensures that all network data is secured by cryptographic proofs. This means that it is almost impossible to change previously validated blocks. Altering the Bitcoin blockchain requires the entire structure to be unraveled record-by-record, something which is a practical impossibility even for the most powerful computers.
So, a successful attack would probably only be able to modify the transactions of a few recent blocks, for a short period of time. And even if the attacker manages to control more than 50% of the Bitcoin hashing power to perform the so-called 51% attack (or majority attack), the underlying protocol would be quickly updated as a response to the attack.
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