New Type of Denial of Service Attack Emerging

New Type of Denial of Service Attack Emerging

Researchers detail a new kind of more sophisticated DoS attack at this week's Black Hat security conference.

Denial of Service (DoS) attacks aren't only not going away, they're getting more sophisticated. At this week's Black Hat security conference, researchers from Trustwave - SpiderLabs are detailing a new DoS attack that targets higher levels of the networking stack than the earlier DoS attacks.
"The main paradigm shift has to do with focusing away from network bandwidth and looking at local resources on the Web server platform itself," Ryan Barnett, senior security researcher at Trustwave - SpiderLabs, told InternetNews.com. "The bottom line is that the overall amount of traffic needed to potentially take down a website is much less than is required to flood the network pipe leading to the Web server."
Denial of Service (DoS) attacks have been around since the beginning of the Web era. Originally, DoS involved networking packet traffic floods that overwhelmed a Web server, denying service to other legitimate users.
"Denial of Service at layer 4 is about simultaneous connections on the network layer that overloads connections," Tom Brennan, director at Trustware - SpiderLabs told InternetNews.com. "Now you can use layer 7 and Web applications to cause a Denial of Service."
Unlike traditional DoS attacks which can be blocked by an IPS, the layer 7 attacks are harder to deal with.
eSecurity Planet details the researchers findings and measures that could be an effective way to mitigate the impact of these new DoS attacks.