To write an exhaustive list of different modes of attack that you can expect would require a book by itself. Instead, just a brief introduction to some of the most common forms of attack is provided here. It is important to have these methods in mind when designing the communication architecture to use for IoT applications.
A Denial of Service (DoS) or Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is normally used to make a service on the Internet crash or become unresponsive, and in some cases, behave in a way that it can be exploited. The attack consists in making repetitive requests to a server until its resources gets exhausted. In a distributed version, the requests are made by many clients at the same time, which obviously increases the load on the target. It is often used for blackmailing or political purposes.
However, as the attack gets more effective and difficult to defend against when the attack is distributed and the target centralized, the attack...