Wireless Security - DoS Attack

The attacks which are directed at disabling the service (making the target not available) or degrading its performance (lowering the availability) lands under the umbrella of Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. The cost of such an attack may be very expensive for a victim or companies, whose business is based on e-commerce. They can count the costs of the attack in millions of dollars, depending on the length of their web service not being available.

Wireless networks are also playing a crucial part in productivity of the employees. We all use wireless laptops and smartphones in a workplace. With the lack of wireless network working, our productivity is decreased.

DoS attacks on availability may be divided into 3 types −

• Layer 1 DoS
• Layer 2 DoS
• Layer 3 DoS

We will discuss each of these attacks in detail in the following chapters.