• High Orbit Ion Cannon

The High Orbit Ion Cannon (HOIC) is a tool that could aid an unauthenticated, remote attacker in conducting distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. The HOIC is a popular DDoS attack tool that is free to download and available for Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms. Low Orbit Ion Cannon (LOIC) was originally developed by Praetox Technologies as an open-source network stress testing tool. It allowed developers to subject their servers to heavy network traffic loads for diagnostic purposes, but it has since been modified in the public domain through various updates and been widely used by Anonymous as a DDoS tool.

There are some other customers that have more structured layered strategy with each layer doing specific actions, trying to stop as much as possible before it gets to the web servers as well (i.e. Beginning upstream at their ISPs and working down). In this scenario, customers may have specific anti-DDoS and traffic deep inspection devices on their perimeter and then utilize NetScaler for specific needs. An example of a specific need is like looking for the presence of certain cookies using the NetScaler policy cookie encryption feature for specific and essential sections of the customer’s website. If the requests do not have the cookies, NetScaler typically drop the request or on some occasions redirect.

High Orbit Ion Cannon

There are also specific NetScaler features that customers have used with these kinds of attacks such as the following.