It’s a known fact that the denial-of-service attacks (DoS attacks) are one of the most common and also most dangerous ways of incapacitating a website or a network. This type of attacks will basically flood the target with useless requests and traffic, making that target eventually shut down or considerably reduce its optimal working capability. The number of such attacks increased a lot in the last quarter of this year, and the main reason for this is that even inexperienced people like me can easily get their hands on a tool that help them perform such actions or on simplified documentation that explain such procedures. Anyway, if you own a website and you care about its security, you should seriously take into consideration this kind of attacks and take measures to avoid becoming one of their victims. A first step in this direction is testing how well your website or network performs when it is the subject of a DoS attack. DoSHTTP is a simple tool that will help you exactly with this first step.
DoSHTTP is a Denial of Service (DoS) testing application that will run on any Windows system and will generate HTTP flooding, allowing testing how a target will perform while under the involved conditions. The first thing I noticed with pleasure about this tool is the very simple, neat and clear interface. Though its main functionality recommends this tool especially to professionals, this interface makes it approachable by any kinds of users. I also appreciate the many additional options that it offers, including the URL Verification window that displays data about the target, the support for HTTP redirection or the fact that it allows adding a specific port within the URL of the target. Another worth-mentioning feature is the fact that it can utilize multiple asynchronous sockets in order to considerably increase the effectiveness of the flooding test.
You may think, and I admit that I did think so, that this tool, as good as it can be, will never be able to effectively test how a much more complex Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack could affect your target. I’m happy to tell you this is only partially true. All it takes for DoSHTTP to emulate a DDoS attack is being used simultaneously on multiple clients.
In conclusion, if you think that it looks too good to be free, then unfortunately you’re right. The good part is that all these many handy features come for a reasonable price.
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