It is a very sophisticated attack attempt, which aims to overwhelm the victims by generating traffic on a server, causing the interruption of the service. The greatest difficulty encountered when dealing with a DDoS attack is the inability of firewalls to perform their protection function. The reason for this is that most of the time the machines involved in the attack are many and come from different geographical areas. It is the large amount of requests that causes the system to crash.
Table of Contents:
What is Slowloris DDoS attack?
How does a HTTP Slowloris attack work?
How to prevent a Slowloris attack?
What is Slowloris DDoS attack?
In 2009, RSnake revealed a cyber attack that was widely iran telegram phone number list on industry forums and blogs. This was done with a tool that did not require bandwidth because it only targeted HTTP without affecting other services running on the server. The name given to this mechanism is a perfect fit: “ Slowloris ,” because it can bring down a web server with a slow and methodical procedure.
Slowloris strikes by using partial HTTP requests and keeping those connections open simultaneously for as long as possible.
How does a HTTP Slowloris attack work?
The attacker first opens multiple connections to the server via partial HTTP requests. If a connection takes too long to complete a request, the server will abort the connection, freeing up the thread, i.e. the server process that handles client requests/connections, for the next request. In this case, the attacker regularly sends partial HTTP requests to the target server to keep the connection alive and eventually overwhelm the server.
The key behind a Slowloris is its ability to perform attacks with very little bandwidth consumption.
How to prevent a Slowloris attack?
There are activities to mitigate a Slowloris attack, such as:
Using a Hardware Load Balancer that only accepts full HTTP connections is the best way to block an attack, this is because the Load Balancer inspects the packet and forwards only full HTTP requests to the web server.
If you are using an F5-based BIG-IP Load Balancer we recommend reading the in-depth article on MyF5 .
Use a CDN like Cloudflare . Cloudflare buffers incoming requests before it starts sending anything to the origin server. As a result, traffic from “low and slow” attacks like Slowloris attacks never reaches their intended target. Learn more about how Cloudflare DDoS Protection blocks slowloris attacks.
