Denial of Service

A Denial of Service (DoS) attack is a hacker attempt to make a device unavailable to its users.

DoS attacks saturate the device with external communication requests, so that it cannot respond to legitimate traffic. These attacks usually lead to a device CPU overload.

One method of resisting DoS attacks employed by the device is the use of Secure Core Technology (SCT), which is enabled by default and cannot be disabled. The Cisco device is an advanced device that handles management traffic, protocol traffic and snooping traffic, in addition to end-user (TCP) traffic. SCT ensures that the device receives and processes management and protocol traffic, no matter how much total traffic is received. This is done by rate-limiting TCP traffic to the CPU.