The feeling of denied and slow down service? To whatever we got this feeling attached to, may it be the slow service our ISP is providing or slow down of server of our favorite movie streaming site or we are about to order on our favorite restaurant online but little we know that their website is down and under maintainance due to the unpatched vulnerability their web server is having. Either of these, one got to blame, the service got denied!
Welcome to another security blog, in this post I will be tackling one of the most common attack out there that never got old. This attack is the older brother of all other little siblings. The design of attack is yet simple and the most common, yet destructive and could lead the enterprise out of business. In fact, this attack could seriously cause alot of loss in a financial institution. It has the wildest assault that inflicts alot of damage and impacts the organization's reputation. Also in this post, I will introduce yet another tool that would perform this badboy.
For every server breakdown, every second counts. Imagine a progressive business who operates its main operation on a public facing website. All the transactions; like product shipment, customer informations,payment transactions -- all of these relies on one little server that doesn't have any protection nor didn't patched and secure their website from any security vulnerabilties. One day, they got compromised! Server crashed, and can no longer be accessed. Their public facing website, down.The business process, down. Their entire transactions, done. They're completely done, and loss alot of assets in a single DDOS attack. Pity the business owner, he just got his precious business shutdown. He owe alot of customers, worst,he can go to jail. On the attacker side, how cool would that be, taking down a hard-earned enterprise in just a single snap. Cool but evil. Devastation yet self-learning.
How does it work?
DDOS are series of requests by which a certain agent connects to the application's server. When connected these agents will process billions of requests in a fraction of a second. Due this humongous amout of requests, the web server will crashed, in a way that it won't be accessible to many.
In order to easily reached the fruit, the attacker will create a botnet that is a group of compromised host programmed to execute malicious tasks. In this scenerio, these bots has one goal in mind, that is to send a millions of request on the target server.
The Exploit
The goal is simple, that is to POST a lot of request in a web application and see if that site can protect themselves from this attack. To do that, since DOS is distributed, I will need to utilize more than a single machine to do the task(but since botnet is not yet on my repertoire) with the help of multithreading that wouldn't be a headache. I have set 3 threads/process that would conduct the execution. Each thread has a random number of requests.The max number of attempts would be on random but would not be greater than 100000000(10exp7).
<RUN>
Let's run this thing!
Step1: User will provide the target web application.
Step2: Sit and Relax...
Step3: Just stay on your sit.
Step4: Chill out and hide...
(1)Due to some intellectual privacy act, I will not expose the target nor give any supporting information on it. But just a hint, this is a video streaming site... :)
(2)You can sit and relax, grab some cold beer and chips , don't get too attached on the screen.
(3) Stay on your sit and enjoy that cold beer and crispy chips you have, stay away from the screen you can have migraine doing so.
(4) Chill out, program's done with the execution.
...and.. we are not successful. Which is a good thing, site has some DDOS protection with 'em. Plus we're not going to jail. But we managed to send 3521 requests before getting blocked. Maybe I would need a better machine, or not. =)
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