Biblio

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks aim to cause downtime or a lack of responsiveness for web services. DDoS attacks targeting the application layer are amongst the hardest to catch as they generally appear legitimate at lower layers and attempt to take advantage of common application functionality or aspects of the HTTP protocol, rather than simply send large amounts of traffic like with volumetric flooding. Attacks can focus on functionality such as database operations, file retrieval, or just general backend code. In this paper, we examine common forms of application layer attacks, preventative and detection measures, and take a closer look specifically at HTTP Flooding attacks by the High Orbit Ion Cannon (HOIC) and “low and slow” attacks through slowloris.

Botnet is one of the most widespread and serious malware which occur frequently in today's cyber attacks. A botnet is a group of Internet-connected computer programs communicating with other similar programs in order to perform various attacks. HTTP-based botnet is most dangerous botnet among all the different botnets available today. In botnets detection, in particularly, behavioural-based approaches suffer from the unavailability of the benchmark datasets and this lead to lack of precise results evaluation of botnet detection systems, comparison, and deployment which originates from the deficiency of adequate datasets. Most of the datasets in the botnet field are from local environment and cannot be used in the large scale due to privacy problems and do not reflect common trends, and also lack some statistical features. To the best of our knowledge, there is not any benchmark dataset available which is infected by HTTP-based botnet (HBB) for performing Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against Web servers by using HTTP-GET flooding method. In addition, there is no Web access log infected by botnet is available for researchers. Therefore, in this paper, a complete test-bed will be illustrated in order to implement a real time HTTP-based botnet for performing variety of DDoS attacks against Web servers by using HTTP-GET flooding method. In addition to this, Web access log with http bot traces are also generated. These real time datasets and Web access logs can be useful to study the behaviour of HTTP-based botnet as well as to evaluate different solutions proposed to detect HTTP-based botnet by various researchers.