Ryan Huber

Follow @ryanhuber

Engineer

Running At 99%: Surviving An Application DoS

Application-Level Denial of Service (DoS) attacks are a threat to nearly everyone hosting content on the Internet. DoS attacks are simple to launch, but can be difficult to defend against. Modern websites are a diverse set of moving parts, and a malicious actor only needs to find the point at which any one of these systems is overwhelmed to bring your website to a halt.

Organizations may approach this problem by increasing capacity, perhaps leveraging the cloud to expand horizontally. This can be a successful short term mitigation strategy, but a combined historic and real-time view of who is accessing your website (and why) gives you the chance to actively defend as opposed to simply absorbing the traffic. Trending this data over time allows your response time to decrease while keeping your front door open. In this talk I will present a new open source project, written primarily in Node.js, that can be used as a defense framework for mitigating these attacks.
  

Bio:

Ryan is an engineer at Risk I/O, a security Software-as-a-Service company. Prior to Risk I/O he spent the majority of his career at Orbitz.com, where his varied roles included: management of the flight search farm, leader of EU information security at sister site eBookers.com, and finally architect on the security team where he explored the defensive side of security.