Denial of Service Test (DoS)
Load testing or denial of service against systems exposed to the internet. Our DoS tests simulate attacks in controlled environments
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DoS Test Objectives
All systems exposed to the internet are susceptible to receive connections from any computer in the world, with limitations such as connection bandwidth or it’s processing capacities. Unfortunately, there are malicious actors who, as if by brute force, saturate the resources of their victims by utilizing one or more computers under their control and bombarding the system to the maximum. This way, they can prevent a server from serving its legitimate clients, causing a service outage.
To protect yourself against this type of attacks, various hardware and software solutions have been developed that can provide better or worse results. The Tarlogic team has developed Denial of Service Tests (DoS), different techniques to simulate this type of attack to test the saturation levels of different types of services exposed to the internet in controlled environments.
Denial of Service Tests Benefits
- Data from actual load tests ran against services exposed to the internet. Our DoS Tests are very effective in monitoring your systems.
- Knowledge of the response time of a contracted security service against attacks of this type.
- Confirmation of the resilience level of bankend systems, forcing their abilities to autoscale in order to handle the required load.
- Verification of vulnerabilities in exposed applications that could facilitate attacks of this type by malicious users.
DDoS and DoS attack overview
Given the nature of these DoS Tests, they are generally executed during the time in which the client has less workload, which usually coincides with night time hours.
For Denial of Service Tests, Tarlogic's cybersecurity team has tools that allow us to simulate attacks from one or multiple IP addresses, in order to try to saturate the resources of the target service. With the aim of refining its capacity to the maximum, increasingly demanding tests are launched until the saturation of resources is reached, whether they are our own or those of the target service.
DOS Test FAQs
What is a DoS attack?
A Denial of Service (DoS) attack is based on making the attacked system or service inaccessible to its users. This is usually achieved by running out of system resources (network, processing, memory …) or by causing an error in the running software.
Many of the typical software vulnerabilities have impact on its availability. For example, a vulnerability that allows remote code execution could allow an attacker to disable the application or delete the database it depends on, resulting in denial of service.
It is also common to have a scenario in which a system has not been dimensioned correctly or does not implement the necessary security measures. In this case, a spike in network traffic could easily cause it to become unavailable.
how to test dos attack?
To identify software vulnerabilities that allow DoS it would be necessary to first identify all vulnerabilities, and then exploit them to study the result. Normally, this type of test is limited to identifying vulnerabilities, since the impact is usually already known.
DoS network attacks, on the other hand, tend to depend more on the infrastructure on which the service is mounted, so testing is needed to determine the impact a real attack could have. To do this, it is necessary to simulate a large amount of traffic that tries to saturate the network resources that manage the service. Specially developed tools are used in this type of test.
What is the difference between DoS and DDoS?
A DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) is characterized by the fact that the service receives the attack from different origins, making it more complicated to categorize legitimate traffic belonging to the attack, and then defend from the attack.
Botnets are usually used for DDoS attacks, networks of infected and distributed computers around the world that are used to carry out joint actions. In most cases, the owners of the devices that belong to a botnet are not even aware of it.
For DDoS tests, due to the illegality of controlling a botnet, distributed servers with multiple IPs are used, partially simulating the sum of resources that a botnet would have. The most realistic tests use a large number of different servers and BGP paths, thus maximizing the volume of traffic reaching the target.