Characterizing and mitigating the DDoS-as-a-Service phenomenon

Abstract

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are an increasing threat on the Internet. Until a few years ago, these types of attacks were only launched by people with advanced knowledge of computer networks. However, nowadays the ability to launch attacks have been offered as a service to everyone, even to those without any advanced knowledge. Booters are online tools that offer DDoS-as-a-Service. Some of them advertise, for less than U$ 5, up to 25 Gbps of DDoS traffic, which is more than enough to make most hosts and services on the Internet unavailable. Booters are increasing in popularity and they have shown the success of attacks against third party services, such as government websites; however, there are few mitigation proposals. In addition, existing literature in this area provides only a partial understanding of the threat, for example by analyzing only a few aspects of one specific Booter. In this paper, we propose mitigation solutions against DDoS-as-a-Service that will be achieved after an extensive characterization of Booters. Early results show 59 different Booters, which some of them do not deliver what is offered. This research is still in its initial phase and will contribute to a Ph.D. thesis after four years. © 2014 International Federation for Information Processing.