How to Detect Application Layer HTTP Flood DDoS Attacks

Cybercriminals are increasingly using application-layer DDoS assaults. DDoS assaults on Layer 3-4 consume a lot of bandwidth, whilst attacks on Layer 7 are sometimes undetectable until it's too late. To avoid detection by standard IDS systems, this attack impersonates normal HTTP request traffic. This attack is usually part of a broader multi-vector DDoS attack aimed at disrupting a victim's infrastructure.

What Is an HTTP Flood Attack, and How Does It Work?

HTTP Flood is a sort of Layer 7 (L7) DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack aimed at overwhelming a server with HTTP requests, which is the accepted definition of an HTTP Flood today. GET, POST, and Fragmentation assaults are all examples of HTTP flood attacks. Layer 7 is the application layer of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model, which establishes protocols like HTTP for communicating across different computer systems. For example, loading web pages is accomplished via the HTTP protocol.

To drain resources from the target server, a Fragmentation attack can employ several devices to transmit pieces of a request, or a GET attack can send multiple GET requests to exhaust processing on the target web server. The HTTP protocol considers all of this to be acceptable behavior, so if further requests are made, the target web server will simply be unable to keep up and stop responding.

A typical HTTP-POST attack hijacks a website's form submission process. Multiple post requests are sent to a targeted server until its capacity is exhausted and denial-of-service occurs during the assault. For this reason, it takes a large number of resources to handle form input and conduct complicated operations like pushing data to the persistence layer (often a database) or doing computations on the data.

A massive amount of data is being sent through the Internet

For HTTP flooding to be successful, the target server must be able to handle several requests at once. Attackers use botnets to increase the number of requests they send as part of an HTTP flood.

Scripts like 'Wreckuests,' which let you launch DDoS attacks via HTTP flood (GET/POST), are an example of this. Python-based and employs proxy servers as "bots," it is a "bot."

How Do You Detect and Resist an HTTP Flood Attack?

Large-scale network DDoS attack mitigation is a difficult task. seconds teams need to be able to detect and stop malicious traffic in real-time, as with all cyber threats, regardless of the scale of the network.

To protect themselves and their clients from this type of assault, Tel eSoft uses a combination of real-time flow monitoring with data prioritization, data aggregation through auto-discovered or user-configured entity sets, IP and domain reputation, Signatures, and Selective Records. To reduce the impact of these application-layer attacks, security analysts can use this to detect unusual behavior, evaluate the impact, and take corrective action throughout their infrastructure to eliminate or divert traffic.