Realtime attack environment for DDoS experimentation

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack has been one of the most serious threats to network security for years. An attacker floods a target server using a large number of compromised computers in order to radically consume victim’s resources (CPU, memory). Although the impact of DDoS attacks on services has been done in several simulations and emulations, the real attack environment reflects more accurately the results of validation and testing of the services. Moreover, the real environment of DDoS attacks can bring other new issues that cannot be seen in the simulation. The article describes design, implementation and testing of proposed DDoS attack testbed. The effort was to create a testbed for the purpose of testing a pseudo-botnet consisting of thousands of nodes in order to try to move as close as possible towards the power of real DDoS attacks. The experimental results prove the potential of proposed real-time DDoS attack testbed and show the impact of targeted attack on a particular victim machine and network.