Before we barge in to know about HTTP Flood let’s understand a few key points:
Ever Heard about DDos? (Distributed Denial of Service)
Perhaps one of you is familiar with it, but most of us are not, including me before writing this essay!
On the surface, this attack may not appear to be a severe threat to your device, but according to security week, there are over 28,000 attacks per day! And if the attack is successful, some businesses might lose tens of thousands of dollars every minute! If that isn't enough to make your jaw drop, remember this: in 2000, a 15-year-old teenager caused an estimated 1.2 billion dollars in damage to businesses due to DDos Attack!
To begin, a DDoS attack is a malicious attempt to disrupt a service's traffic by overwhelming the target with a stream of Internet traffic. DDoS attacks are not the same as the attacks that the general public is aware of, such as those in which hackers get into your computer, extract your personal information, and so on.
Its main goal is to flood a specific service's traffic so that users attempting to access it are unable to do so. It could be used as a ploy to conceal other malicious behaviors. As an illustration., consider one of your friends is copying your work, and you're diverting your teacher's attention to another topic so that your friend can finish his or her work during that interval! It's that simple!
In short, DDoS can be destructive to any individual or company, now let us go to HTTP Flood!
HTTPS flood is a type of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack in which an attempt is made to overload a web server or application with a stream of HTTP/S requests. HTTP floods are based on technically correct (legal) requests to the webserver that is being targeted. Malicious HTTP/S requests are extremely difficult to identify and defend against since they are practically indistinguishable from ordinary traffic. This attack is comparable to repeatedly refreshing a web browser on multiple computers at the same time – a high number of HTTP requests flood the server, causing a denial-of-service. An HTTP flood DDoS attack's primary goal is to generate "attack traffic" that closely resembles that of a human user. As aforementioned, it becomes more difficult for a victim to distinguish between genuine and malicious traffic. The server becomes unavailable to legitimate users as a result of such attacks.
Consider this scenario: "Peta" is a small business owner who runs an online business. She is not a techie but has managed to run an internet business, thus "Anthu" the hacker tries to flood her site with extra requests so that her client "Siddhu" is unable to access it owing to traffic congestion.
In this case, Anthu the hacker has used botnets to increase the efficiency and impact of his attacks. Botnets are often made up of thousands of computers and networked systems that are operated remotely. They send a barrage of concurrent requests to the target's infrastructure until it can no longer handle the load.
Let's understand the categories now !
HTTP Get attack: Many devices are used in this type of attack to request photos, files, or other media from a targeted site. A DDoS flood attack occurs when the victim receives requests from several sources and continues to receive them.
HTTP post-attack: When a user fills out an online form and submits it through their browser, the server must manage the HTTP request and direct it to a database. When compared to the amount of processing power necessary to make an HTTP post request, the technique for handling data submission is significantly more intensive. This technique makes use of resource power consumption by delivering a large number of HTTP requests to the web server, resulting in an HTTP DDoS attack.
Aside from the standard GET method, the HTTP protocol also supports HEAD, POST, and other methods. These methods are frequently used in conjunction with a GET flood in order to target less frequented portions of the server code. Because a POST request is typically larger than a GET request, it is less suspicious than a huge GET request and thus more likely to pass through the mitigating devices guarding the server undetected.
How to Mitigate HTTP Flood Attack?
Combating an HTTP flood assault can be a difficult, time-consuming, and comprehensive task. One way entails providing a task to determine whether or not the target machine is a bot, similar to a captcha test that questions whether or not you are a robot. By imposing a requirement, such as a JavaScript challenge, the likelihood of an HTTP flood is reduced. Implementing a web application firewall, maintaining the reputation and popularity of an IP address to recognize it as a valid source of traffic, and selectively blocking all malicious traffic are other approaches to thwart HTTP flood DDoS attacks.
In any event, defending against HTTP flood attacks requires expertise and technology that only application layer (Layer 7) DDoS protection can provide.
P.S. Just because you bought a new device, it does not mean your device is bulletproof to such an attack! Stay Aware Peps!
Work Cited
“What is an HTTP flood attack?” Myra Security, https://www.myrasecurity.com/en/http-flood-attack/. Accessed 3 April 2022.
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