Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) is a common type of Cybercrime. It can strongly damage a company reputation and increase its costs. Attackers improve continuously their strategies. They doubled the amount of unleashed communication requests in volume, size, and frequency in the last few years. This occurs against different hosts, causing resource exhaustion. Previous studies focused on detecting or mitigating ongoing DDoS attacks. Yet, addressing DDoS attacks when they are already in place may be too late. In this article, we consider network resilience by early prediction of attack trends. We show empirically the advantage of using non-parametric leading indicators for early prediction of volumetric DDoS attacks. We report promising results over a real dataset from CAIDA. Our results raise new questions and opportunities for further research in early predicting trends of DDoS attacks.
With the advent of new technologies and various services provided in the context of computer networks, a large volume of data is being generated. The main challenge in this area is providing network protection services against various threats and vulnerabilities. So far, many techniques have been proposed to deal with these threats. All of these techniques pursue the same goal, preventing attackers from reaching their objectives. A solution based on early warning systems EWSs is what exactly security teams need to manage the threats properly. EWS, as a complement to Intrusion Detection System, is a proactive approach against security threats. This is carried out through the early detection of potential behavior of a system, evaluating the scope of malicious behavior, and finally, using suitable response against any kind of detectable security event. This paper presents a comprehensive review on EWSs including definitions, applications, architectures, alert correlation aspects, and other technical requirements. Furthermore, previous studies and existing EWSs have been described and analyzed here. A classification of EWSs has been presented: commercial systems and systems under research and development. Finally, from the studies about EWSs, we conclude some challenges and research issues are still remain open. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.