A Dynamic Countermeasure Method for Large-Scale Network Attacks

Increased sophistication of present day worms leading to large scale denial of service attacks on vital installations has been a source of concern. Intrusion detection systems and intrusion prevention systems provide a limited solution to a concurrent problem. Proactive preemptive techniques employed by intrusion prevention systems are more effective than the reactive techniques employed by intrusion detection systems. However these techniques are not adequate to counter a large scale distributed denial of service attacks. In this paper, we propose a countermeasure which uses dynamic agents to mitigate denial of service attacks. These dynamics agents are called Gnipper vaccine. Gnipper vaccine provides an effective technique capable of providing an enterprise-wide response. Gnipper vaccine is an agent which resides on the host computer capable of dropping any malicious packets. The vaccine propagates one hop at a time towards the source of the attacker