An Availability Attack Test Against an End-of-Support Online Server

It is imperative to ensure the security and availability of networked systems, especially those that provide services. A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is a popular way used to attack availability. It is also imperative that organizations test a server's resistance to DDoS attacks, especially if the server is nearing its end-of-life/support date by the vendor. This paper gleans different methods, to include simulation tools, load testing, network monitoring, and security best practices to test volumetric DDoS attacks on Microsoft Windows Server 2012. These methods can be used to evaluate a Windows server's resistance to DDoS attacks. Additionally, the Time-To-First-Byte (TTFB) metric will be utilized to identify DDoS overall DDoS impact, which is something has never been done before in this context.