SYN Flood Attack Detection and Prevention Technique (SFaDMT) in Distributed Environment

In the modern digital landscape, cyber-attacks have become highly advanced and difficult to detect, especially in distributed systems. These Denial of Service (DoS) or Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks lead to resource unavailability for legitimate users, causing financial losses for organizations. To counter these threats, researchers have proposed efficient mitigation techniques. According to Kaspersky's Q3 report, SYN Flood is the most prevalent type of D DoS attack, increasing from 76% to 81% compared to the Q2 report. DDoS attacks can be executed directly or indirectly. In a direct attack, control traffic is sent straight from the attackers to the zombies to target the victim host. Conversely, in an indirect DDoS attack, control traffic is sent indirectly to reflectors by zombies to compromise the target host. Reflectors are uncompromised systems that only respond to requests. To mitigate such attacks, traffic shaping and Pushback techniques are employed. Our research introduces an adaptive heuristic-based method called SYN Flood Attack Detection and Mitigation Technique (SFaDMT) to detect DDoS SYN flood attacks. This study proposes an efficient technique for detecting and blocking SYN attacks. The SFaDMT technique is based on a decision support mechanism. The proposed model is simulated and analyzed in the OMNET simulator, and a comparison is made with the latest technique. The results demonstrate an improvement in detection with the proposed solution.