Slowreq: A weapon for cyberwarfare operations. Characteristics, limits, performance, remediations

Abstract

In the last years, with the advent of the Internet, cyberwarfare operations moved from the battlefield to the cyberspace, locally or remotely executing sabotage or espionage operations in order to weaken the enemy. Among the technologies and methods used during cyberwarfare actions, Denial of Service attacks are executed to reduce the availability of a particular service on a network. In this paper we present a Denial of Service tool that belongs to the Slow DoS Attacks category. We describe in detail the attack functioning and we compare the proposed threat with a similar one known as slowloris, showing the enhancements provided by the proposed tool.