Your server appearing pretty slow could be many things from wrong configs, scripts and dodgy hardware – but sometimes it could be because someone is flooding your server with traffic known as DoS ( Denial of Service ) or DDoS ( Distributed Denial of Service ). Denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) or Distributed Denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack) is an attempt to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users.
This attack generally target sites or services hosted on high-profile web servers such as banks, credit card payment gateways, and even root nameservers. DoS attacks are implemented by either forcing the targeted computer to reset, or consuming its resources so that it can no longer provide its services or obstructs the communication media between the users and the victim so that they can no longer communicate adequately. In this small article you’ll see how to check if your server is under attack from the Linux Terminal with the netstat command