Take Away
| Attack Motivation | Description |
|---|---|
| Political Activism | Hacktivism. |
| Divert Attention | The attacker diverts attention from extortion, manly if it is a high-volume attack. |
| Competitor Advantage | Taking down a competitor’s website/application to have an advantage over them. |
| Nation State/Cyber-Warfare | Government taking down websites or infrastructures. |
| Curiosity | Script kiddies using pre-made hacking tools without knowing its capabilities. |
| Disruption | Purely wipe out an organization or cause them financial damage (EDoS attack). |
Attack Motivations
DoS and DDoS attacks may have varying motivations behind them. Table 1 is an attempt to classify the DoS/DDoS attack motivations in no particular order.
- Political activism may be one motivation behind an attack. Those involved in such attacks are known as a “hacktivist” – a type of hacking motivated by politics. They are affiliated groups that use computers/networks to protest or for political ends.
- Another reason for a DoS/DDoS attack is to divert attention from what a bad actor is actually doing on your system – that is to say, extortion. While performing this attack, bad actors can deflect attention away from stealing your information or ransomware.
- Competitor advantage may also be a reason that a DoS/DDoS attack has been performed. This would entail taking down a competitor’s website or application. Another form to view this motive is with a bidder example (Heron). If a bad actor is to place a low bid of $5, then they would like to ensure that no other bidder bids higher than $5. By intending to prevent other individuals from bidding so that they win the bid, they perform a denial of service attack. The bad actor overwhelms the system so that no other bids come through. Thus, if another bidder bids $75, since the system cannot receive any requests, they do not win the bid – as in, the bad actor wins the bid with $5. Also, perhaps slowing down a competitor’s application is enough to agitate customers – that is to say, customers leaving.
- Denial of service attacks can also be performed by governments to takedown website or infrastructures.
- Curiosity is among “script kiddies” to use pre-built hacking tools that perform malicious activities such as DoS/DDoS attacks. “Script kiddies” typically do not understand the tools that they are working with entirely but nonetheless proceed to experiment with them in the wild.
- Lastly, pure disruption may be a reason to harm an organization with the goal to either hurt them financially with an EDoS attack or wipe their infrastructure out.