Taxonomies of Distributed Denial of Service Networks, Attacks, Tools, and Countermeasures

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks have become a large problem for users of computer systems connected to the Internet. DDoS attackers hijack secondary victim systems using them to wage a coordinated large-scale attack against victim systems. As new countermeasures are developed to prevent DDoS attacks and help systems that are victims of such an attack, attackers are constantly developing new software and adapting older DDoS attack tools to circumvent these new countermeasures. In this paper we describe the taxonomies of DDoS attacks, the software tools used to wage a DDoS attack and the countermeasures available. These different taxonomies are presented so that similarities and patterns within DDoS attacks and tools can be better understood. This work is intended to assist in developing solutions that will provide a more generalized approach to countering DDoS attacks so that as new derivative attacks are developed a generic countermeasure model can be used to prevent secondary victims and stop DDoS attacks.