DDoS Attack Education Simulator

Overview

The DDoS Attack Education Simulator provides an interactive way to understand how Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks work and how various mitigation strategies can protect against them. This tool simulates real-time traffic patterns, server load, and the impact of malicious traffic on server availability.

Through hands-on experimentation, you can observe how attackers overwhelm server capacity, how legitimate users are affected, and how different defense mechanisms help maintain service availability.

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How to Use This Simulator

Basic Controls

  1. Normal Traffic Rate: Adjust the number of legitimate user requests per second
  2. Attack Intensity: Control the volume of malicious traffic from distributed sources
  3. Server Capacity: Set how many requests your server can handle per second
  4. Number of Attack Sources: Simulate attacks from multiple distributed machines

Running Simulations

  • Click Start Normal Traffic to begin with only legitimate requests
  • Increase Attack Intensity to launch a simulated DDoS attack
  • Watch the visualizations to see how the server responds
  • Toggle Mitigation Strategies to see how different defenses work

Understanding the Visualizations

Traffic Visualization (Top Chart) - Green area represents legitimate user traffic - Red area shows attack traffic - Blue dashed line indicates server capacity - When traffic exceeds capacity, requests are dropped

Request Queue & Server State (Bottom Panel) - Shows queued requests waiting to be processed - Green bars indicate successfully processed requests - Red bars show dropped requests due to overload - Active mitigations are displayed with checkmarks

Experiment Ideas

Scenario 1: Normal Operations

  • Set Normal Traffic to 20 req/s
  • Set Server Capacity to 50 req/s
  • Observe healthy server performance with room to spare

Scenario 2: Basic DDoS Attack

  • Keep Normal Traffic at 20 req/s
  • Increase Attack Intensity to 100 req/s
  • Watch how legitimate users are affected when server is overwhelmed

Scenario 3: Testing Mitigations

  • Enable IP Blocking to filter out known malicious sources (blocks ~70% of attack traffic)
  • Enable Traffic Filtering to identify and drop suspicious patterns (blocks additional 50%)
  • Enable Rate Limiting to prevent any single source from flooding the server
  • Enable Load Balancing to increase server capacity by distributing load

Scenario 4: Massive Attack

  • Set Attack Intensity to 200 req/s from 1000 sources
  • Try different mitigation combinations to maintain service
  • Observe how layered defenses work together

Key Learning Points

  • DDoS attacks exploit limited server resources by overwhelming capacity with malicious traffic
  • Distributed attacks are harder to defend against because they come from many different sources
  • No single mitigation is perfect - effective defense requires multiple layers
  • Attack detection and response speed are critical to minimizing service disruption
  • Understanding traffic patterns helps distinguish legitimate users from attackers

Real-World Applications

This simulation demonstrates concepts used in real DDoS protection systems:

  • Cloud-based DDoS protection (Cloudflare, AWS Shield, Akamai)
  • Web Application Firewalls (WAF) with traffic filtering
  • Content Delivery Networks (CDN) for load distribution
  • Anomaly detection systems that identify unusual traffic patterns
  • Rate limiting and throttling in API gateways and web servers

Tips for Exploration

  • Start with small attack intensities and gradually increase to see degradation
  • Compare the effectiveness of different mitigation strategies
  • Notice how attack traffic from more sources is harder to block with IP filtering
  • Experiment with server capacity to understand the importance of proper resource planning
  • Try disabling all mitigations during an attack to see the worst-case impact