Characterization and comparison of Distributed Denial of Service attack tools

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is a prime threat for the extensively used Internet based services like e-commerce, banking, medicine, education etc. Hackers launch DDoS attacks by compromising the vulnerable systems (called bots) in order to degrade or sometimes completely disrupt these services. In recent years, DDoS attacks have been increased in strength, frequency and sophistication. Though many solutions have been proposed in literature to combat against such attacks but still defending from a DDoS attack is a challenging issue. Hackers are continuously upgrading their skills to launch diversified attacks and are developing new means to circumvent these countermeasures. The purpose of this paper is to characterize and compare the popular DDoS attack tools used by the attackers in recent times, their modus operandi and types of attacks, they launch. This would help the researcher community to handpick the appropriate DDoS attack tool for their experimentation purpose.