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Other than client puzzles, what are some things a website can do to defend itself against a LOIC Hive Mind attack?

The Low Orbit Ion Cannon (LOIC) is an attack tool which features a user-friendly GUI as well as an option to voluntarily add yourself to a botnet controlled via an IRC channel.

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  • EECS 388 rox my socks.
    – JobHunter69
    Oct 29, 2019 at 1:38

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Akamai and Cloudflare provide DDoS protection services which will disperse traffic using DNS load balancing, blacklist bots, and filter attacks before they reach your server(s).

LOIC produces an HTTP GET flood, this is not an advanced DoS technique but rather a simple script to carry out a trivial attack. Any worthwhile DDoS prevention product should solve this basic attack. Until a certain point, of course, and then no one can solve it.

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  • Isn't it better to tell the author how to mitigate the attack himself rather than telling him to take out the credit card and let a third-party do it?
    – user42178
    Nov 5, 2014 at 20:30
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    @AndréDaniel, How to mitigate it yourself: take out the credit card and buy a whole lot of servers and load balancers, behind one or several high-bandwidth connections. The basic technique for mitigating a DDoS attack is to have infrastructure capable of handling more traffic than the attacker is capable of producing.
    – Mark
    Nov 5, 2014 at 22:50
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    @Mark it depends on the attack. In this case the attack floods GET requests in order to make the server process each request and waste resources (especially if the page is a dynamic PHP/Ruby/whatever page and not a static one), but some firewall rules and/or rate limiting will be enough in most cases, unless the attackers totally overload the server's bandwidth in which case indeed you can't do much without extra bandwidth and servers.
    – user42178
    Nov 5, 2014 at 22:53
  • @user42178 The only way to mitigate it is with large amounts of hardware and big pipes. Either yours or someone else's.
    – PushfPopf
    Oct 31, 2018 at 15:11

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