Preventing Attacks in Real-Time through the Use of a Dummy Server

Zero-day exploits against servers pose one of the most challenging problems faced by system and security administrators. Current solutions rely mainly on signature databases of known attacks and are not efficient at detecting new attacks not covered by their attack signature database. We propose using a dummy server, i.e. A mirror of the server to be protected but without the real data. Consequently, any incoming network packet is first tested against the dummy server and once it is ensured that the packet is benign, it is delivered to the real server. This would prevent all types of attacks, including those based on zero-day exploits, from reaching the protected server.