Denial of service can take many forms but the basic purpose of an attack is to disrupt the availability of a service and to prevent normal operations to occur.

This can be achieved either by saturating a system's means of communication with end users or a back-end server or by removing a critical system dependancy such as a database table, power or the system BIOS.

The most common method of attacking availability however is network based. This kind of attack can be executed in a few different ways depending on the desired effect, the available bandwidth, the available attacking capability and the service being attacked.

The LOIC tool you will be using in this lab was made famous during Anonymous’ attacks on the church of scientology during Project Chanology.

This lab is part of a series on cyber network security.

Learning Objectives

Upon completion of this lab you will be able to:

• Demonstrate how to use the Low Orbit Ion Cannon (LOIC) to perform traffic-based Denial of Service (DoS) attacks

Intended Audience

This lab is intended for:

• Cyber and network security specialists

Prerequisites

You should possess:

• A basic understanding of Windows operating system environments