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What is the value of a DoS attack as part of a security assessment? this is the question asked to me in EC council's exam preparation, so need to know. not intending any attack

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Friendly advice: dumping homework assignments as-is tends to make people not want to bother answering. You should try to do the assignment, and ask more pointed questions if you get stuck. You'll get more, better answers. –  Gilles Sep 1 '12 at 11:56
In addition to @Gilles point, use tags which are relevant to the question. This will help specialists in those tags find your question. –  Rory Alsop Sep 1 '12 at 12:26
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2 Answers

To test the resilience of the network and systems:

  1. Test resilience of routers and switches (edge network)
  2. Test resilience of servers and other boxes.

To predict the outcome of such attack and prepare mitigation plans in case of emergency.

In some cases such attacks can take weeks.

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The basic idea is to see what fails first and what the consequences of that failure are. This will tell you what to look for should there be an actual attack and it also might identify things that are weaker than they should be. –  David Schwartz Sep 1 '12 at 9:39
The key point is to manage the DR plan as well protection for elements in the transmission path. The cloud resilience is a different subject - HA etc. The DoS is actually resilience, and not consequences of failure. –  Andrew Smith Sep 1 '12 at 12:58
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Basically, for resilience and protections testing. The customer want to know his security posture in a denial-of-service context.

Distributed denial-of-service is harder to test of course as it would require very specific resources (a botnet or whatever), but one can still test the existence of controls, protections and mitigations in place against such attacks.

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