Evaluation of Internet Connectivity Under Distributed Denial of Service Attacks from Botnets of Varying Magnitudes

In the last decade, electronic devices with internet accessibility have become commonplace. With the consistent growth and evolution of the Internet, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are increasingly more common and sophisticated. These attacks, depending on their type and magnitude, can be devastating to system intended to be the target of said attack. Several compromised internet-connected computer systems become part of a Botnet which can perform small to large scale DDoS attacks causing the victim system to consume resources, such as bandwidth, memory or processing power, at an alarming rate. With no available resources to process information, legitimate connections are unable to access the system under attack hence affecting operations related to the targeted system. In this paper, we study and analyze two common DDoS attacks using a set of simulated networks containing a range of over 16 million systems, 65 thousand systems and 254 systems against a targeted system in a closed lab environment as legitimate traffic attempts to reach the targeted system.