Cyber Security Evaluation of CentOS Red Hat Based Operating System Under Cyber Attack with Increasing Magnitude

The increasing interest in ‘always-connected’ devices and the Internet of Things has led to electronic devices with Internet connectivity becoming a staple in modern household and workplace. Consequently, this increase has also led to an increase in vulnerable devices, ripe for hijacking by a malicious third party. Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks have consistently been an issue since the birth of the Internet. With the large number of devices available today, the strength and consistency of these attacks has only grown and will continue to grow. Since, depending on certain variables, these DDoS attacks can effectively render a target system inoperable, precautions must be taken in order to prevent these attacks. Not all devices are created equal; Many harbor flaws that allow them to be used by a separate, malicious host without the knowledge of the owner. There is a myriad of devices on the market today, any of which can be used in a network of zombie machines meant to carry out an attack, a botnet. These botnets are used to flood a system with information, ideally consuming large amounts of resources, such as memory or processing power. If the attack is successful, operation within the target system is effectively halted, often for long periods of time in the more severe attacks. Just like the variety in devices, there is a variety in the software that operates these devices. In this experiment, I focus efforts on comparing the ability of CentOS 15 with Windows Server 2012R to function under attack. I analyze four popular DDoS attacks using simulated network traffic consisting of botnets ranging from of over 16 million systems, 65 thousand systems and 254 systems in a controlled, closed environment