Practical Network Scanning

Application layer attacks

Application attacks are low traffic rate attacks which are very hard to detect. These are targeted at weaknesses in an application or server with the goal of establishing a connection and exhausting processes and transactions. Such attacks do not require a botnet type army; generating a low traffic rate needs few sources and the traffic type seems to be legitimate.

The most famous example of a Layer-7 attack is the HTTP Get/Post DDoS attack.

• HTTP Flood Attack: HTTP flood is a very common type of DDoS attack in which the cyber criminal exploits HTTP GET or POST requests to attack an online web server or application. The attacker forms a botnet army to send the targeted server a very large number of GET (image content) ...