Knowledge base
What is a DOS/Smurf Attack?
A DOS, DDOS (Denial Of Service) attack is any action that is taken in order to disrupt or effectively disable a network.
Denial of service attacks are mostly generated by many machines that have been exploited and then send out a ping (ICMP packet) flood to the network that they are attacking. This flood saturates the network connection and brings the network to a slowdown or complete outage in many cases.
A smurf attack is basically a Denial of service attack that is instigated using an exploit progarm called "smurf".
The exploit programs basically install themselves onto hundreds of machines and then launch the attack onto the chosen network at any given time.
It is very hard to control these attacks as you could imagine with hundreds, in some cases thousands of machines launching ping floods at the network.
Categories
Getting started:
Cpanel control panel:
- How do I access my control panel?
- How do I access the Fantastico auto-installer?
- Awstats: Error: LogFile parameter
- Access your Cpanel before your domain has propagated
- Cron jobs: what are they, and how to use them
Webhost manager (WHM):
- Do not change the username or domain name for any of your domains
- Always let WHM finish the current process
- Do not use hyphens or underscores in usernames
- Access all accounts with the WHM password
- Setting strong passwords
Questions and tips:
E-mail:
- Blocking all mail to an e-mail address
- What are the SMTP and POP server addresses?
- Mailing lists: limits of usage
- What happens to e-mail when the server is down: is it returned to the sender or lost?
- How do I access webmail for my account?
Domains and DNS:
FTP and files:
- What are the FTP timeout settings?
- The public_html and www directories
- What is the maximum number of FTP connections per user?
- What is the max number of files/directories I can display in FTP?
- File permissions explained
Htaccess magic:
CGI, PHP and Perl:
- What is the path to..?
- Formmail: important notes
- ImageMagick
- SuExec: what it is and how it affects your scripts