Counteract the Outflanking of DDoS Countermeasures : A Framework for Generating DDoS Defense Guidelines

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) is today a commonly seen computer network attack with the purpose of disrupting various services. This is often achieved by overwhelming the target with network traffic, or exploiting various flaws in how the target system handles various requests. One of the latest occurrences in Sweden is the attack on one of Telia’s customers that caused severe interruptions in their network infrastructure.Similar to all fields within technology, DDoS attacks and protection techniques are constantly changing. Hence, organizations and other entities have difficulties being up-to-date regarding how to protect their environment.This thesis is meant to address this issue by developing a framework that can be utilized by entities to receive protection improvement suggestions based on their already implemented defenses. This research was based on the iterative feedback-oriented Design Science Research Methodology (DSRM) and was conducted in collaboration with the Swedish Armed Forces (SwAF). This effort is solely meant to lay the foundation of the framework. Therefore, no real-world implementation has been conducted.The resulting framework was influenced by the concept of honeynets and, based on the evaluation, will be suitable as an informative and educational tool for entities that wish to review their current protection.Validerat; 20150913 (global_studentproject_submitter