In early 2000 and 2001 and the late 90s, hackers were becoming more sophisticated in their attacks, moving from traditional methods such as SYN flooding to more malicious attacks like Denial of Service. The first well known attack was against the University of Minnesota in August of 1999, when thousands of machines flooded the school’s network with UDP packets.
In February of 2000, massive attacks were launched against prominent corporate websites such as Microsoft, Amazon, E-bay and many more. These sites suffered complete loss of connectivity to the internet or massive slowdowns.
Short for denial-of-service attack, a type of attack on a network that is designed to bring the network to its knees by flooding it with useless traffic. Many DoS attacks, such as the Ping of Death and Teardrop attacks, exploit limitations in the TCP/IP protocols. For all known DoS attacks, there are software fixes that system administrators can install to limit the damage caused by the attacks. But, like viruses, new DoS attacks are constantly being dreamed up by hackers.