Slowcomm: Design, development and performance evaluation of a new slow DoS attack

The Internet, a useful tool for communicating information, is now a pervasive and necessary infrastructure for modern economy. Accordingly, because of economic motivations, it became an arena for cyber- warfare and cybercrime. In this paper, we present the novel threat called SlowComm and we show how it can successfully lead a DoS on a targeted system using a small amount of attack bandwidth. Further, since the proposed attack is not bounded to a specific protocol, it can be considered a protocol indepen- dent attack, proving the ability it has to affect different Internet services.