Denial-of-service attack : A realistic implementation of a DoS attack

Abstract: This report describes some of the most well known denial of service attacks (DoS-attacks). This will be done in the first part of the report, the second part describes an implementation of a DoS-attack. The main purpose of its first part is to closer examine common DoS-attacks, the purpose of such attacks, the protection methods that can be deployed to mitigate these attacks and the ways that are used to measure these attacks. The second part describes a implementation of a practical attack implemented using HTTP POST requests to overwhelm a web server, so called HTTP POST attack. The attack was carried out using different number of attack nodes, up to the default maximum limit for Apache web server. The attack succeeded after several attempts with different parameters. As a result of the experiments we learnt that a successful HTTP POST attack needs to take between 15% and 100% of the maximum permitted clients to make an impact on the server’s response time. The server that was attacked had no defence mechanism to protect itself against DoS-attacks. One important thing to note is that this attack is carried out in a protected environment so as not to affect the external environment.