Efficacy of Coordinated Distributed Multiple Attacks (A Proactive Approach to Cyber Defense)

The goal of the proposed coordinated distributed multiple attack (CDMA) is to strike a selected adversarial network and render its services useless. In this attack a number of compromised systems are used as facilitators in a coordinated manner to launch an attack on a victim's host or network. By distributing the attack and varying the type of attack the source attacker exhibits a decreased intensity of activity; therefore, the attack becomes harder to detect. Meanwhile, the concentrated effect on the victim is sufficient to overload network peripherals and systems, resulting in denial of service. In CDMAs an adversary can target a wide range of vulnerabilities present in victims' operating systems, protocol stacks, applications, network infrastructure, etc