Denial of Service (DoS) attacks can either bring down your application completely or reduce your level of service. These attacks often work by exploiting flaws in your application to cause a general failure, delivering excess data to cause memory starvation, causing one client to consume all available resources, or taking advantage of poorly designed features to consume too much CPU power. I've written about application errors that can cause failures in previous articles (i.e., "Good Programming and the Rules for Writing Secure Code", "Parsing POP"), so I'll just say one more time that there is no substitute for writing solid code.
This week, let's look at a few of the ways that attackers can attempt to starve the resources associated with your application. Arming yourself with this knowledge will give you some ideas on how to protect your applications against DoS attacks. . . .
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