CAPEC-469: HTTP DoS
An attacker performs flooding at the HTTP level to bring down only a particular web application rather than anything listening on a TCP/IP connection. This denial of service attack requires substantially fewer packets to be sent which makes DoS harder to detect. This is an equivalent of SYN flood in HTTP. The idea is to keep the HTTP session alive indefinitely and then repeat that hundreds of times. This attack targets resource depletion weaknesses in web server software. The web server will wait to attacker's responses on the initiated HTTP sessions while the connection threads are being exhausted.
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Overview
CAPEC-469 (HTTP DoS) is a standard-level attack pattern catalogued by MITRE in the Common Attack Pattern Enumeration and Classification (CAPEC). It describes a recurring method attackers use to exploit software weaknesses.
What the attacker needs
Prerequisites
- HTTP protocol is usedWeb server used is vulnerable to denial of service via HTTP flooding
Resources required
- Ability to issues hundreds of HTTP requests
How to mitigate it
Defenses that reduce the risk of CAPEC-469.
- Configuration: Configure web server software to limit the waiting period on opened HTTP sessions
- Design: Use load balancing mechanisms
Terminology & mappings
Mapped taxonomies
- ATTACK: Endpoint Denial of Service: Service Exhaustion Flood (1499.002)
Frequently asked questions
Common questions about CAPEC-469.
- What is CAPEC-469?
- An attacker performs flooding at the HTTP level to bring down only a particular web application rather than anything listening on a TCP/IP connection. This denial of service attack requires substantially fewer packets to be sent which makes DoS harder to detect. This is an equivalent of SYN flood in HTTP. The idea is to keep the HTTP session alive indefinitely and then repeat that hundreds of times. This attack targets resource depletion weaknesses in web server software. The web server will wait to attacker's responses on the initiated HTTP sessions while the connection threads are being exhausted.
- How do you prevent CAPEC-469?
- Configuration: Configure web server software to limit the waiting period on opened HTTP sessions
- What weaknesses does CAPEC-469 target?
- CAPEC-469 exploits 2 CWE weaknesses, including CWE-770 (Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling), CWE-772 (Missing Release of Resource after Effective Lifetime).
- How severe is CAPEC-469?
- MITRE rates CAPEC-469 as Low severity.
References
Attack-pattern data is sourced from the MITRE CAPEC catalog (v3.9). Weakness associations link to the corresponding CWE entries on RadicalNotion.AI.
Defend against CAPEC-469
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