October 21, 2014
In our last blog post, we analyzed the attack tools used to launch DDoS attacks in Hong Kong. Today, I’d like to examine Torshammer – a slow-rate DDoS attack tool – that has been used frequently by hacktivists.
Tor’s Hammer is a slow-rate DDoS attack tool that is efficient and very disruptive on most apache servers.
Similar to regular volumetric DDoS attacks, slow-rate DDoS attacks exhaust web server resources by generating a large amount of connections for as long as possible. More technically, it uses the classic form of slow POST attack, generating HTTP POST requests and connections that will hold for around 1000-30000 seconds.
Instead of leveraging huge attack bandwidth or large amounts of HTTP requests per second, slow-rate DDoS attacks simply exploit the maximum current connection time apache servers can handle.
Stay tuned as we collect more information on Tor’s Hammer and its attack history in Hong Kong. For a more in-depth analysis on this slow-rate DDoS attack tool and its impact on servers, please visit my personal blog post.
