Background

Denial of Service attacks overwhelm a target with either too many connection requests or too much bandwidth. The intended result is to make the target inaccessible, although other infrastructure elements (routers, switches, load balancers, etc.) may suffer collateral damage along the path of an attack. A variety of attack types, including connection floods, TCP SYN floods, ICMP and UDP floods may be used in such an attack.

DoS attacks are often launched against high profile targets by using a network of zombie machines in a botnet. Sources can be forged, although targets are usually not forged.