A New Spin on DoS Web Server Attacks

Sergey Shekyan, senior software engineer with Qualys, has published proof-of-concept code that takes a different spin on HTTP denial-of-service (DoS) attack. According to this Dark Reading report, the spin on the attack is simply dragging out the process of reading the server's response and ultimately overwhelming it.

"Shekyan's Slowhttptest attack tool initially was inspired by related open-source tools Slowloris and OWASP's Slow HTTP Post. Slowloris keeps connections open by sending partial HTTP requests and sends headers at regular intervals to prevent the sockets from closing, while the Slow HTTP POST distributed DoS (DDoS) tool simulates an attack using POST headers with a legitimate "content-length" field that lets the Web server know how much data is arriving. Once the headers are sent, the POST message body is transmitted slowly, thus gridlocking the connection and server resources."

Read the Full Story at Dark Reading