In a Specially Crafted Packet Attack, attackers take advantage of websites with poor designs, vulnerable web applications and/or have improper integration with backend databases. For example, attackers can exploit vulnerabilities in HTTP, SQL, SIP, DNS etc., and generate specially crafted packets to take advantage of these protocol “stack” vulnerabilities to ultimately take the servers offline. They can also generate requests that will lock up database queries. These attacks are highly specific and effective because they consume huge amounts of server resources and often are launched from a single attacker. An example of a Specially Crafted Denial of Service attack is MS13-039.
