What is EDoS?

Economic Denial of Sustainability (EDoS) is a cybersecurity threat targeting cloud environments. EDoS attacks exploit the elasticity of clouds, particularly auto-scaling capabilities, to inflate the billing of a cloud user until the account reaches bankruptcy or large-scale service withdrawal.

EDoS attacks exploit the cloud’s economies of scale to disrupt or discontinue the availability of cloud services and infrastructure that support applications, systems, and corporate networks. It typically involves remotely-controlled bots that covertly send fake requests. If these requests bypass security controls, the cloud service provisions additional resources and charges the cloud user.

Traditional incident response strategies are ill-equipped with EDoS threats for several reasons:

  • EDoS traffic uses IP spoofing and is difficult to detect using existing network analysis techniques, unless attackers are using known bad IPs.
  • The application and end-users are not initially affected by EDoS attacks. Cloud      resources scale up to meet the additional traffic, at least until the budget is depleted, so application performance metrics cannot be used to detect the attack.
  • System hardening techniques are not effective against EDoS because traffic does not exploit any type of vulnerability in the traditional sense.
  • Even once an EDoS attack is detected, incident responders cannot react using existing tools. They must establish an interface to cloud cost-management systems, to be able to short-circuit automatic scaling mechanisms.

DoS vs DDos vs EDoS

Let’s explore the difference between the more familiar “..oS” attacks and the new kid on the block – EDoS.

DoS

In a Denial of Service (DoS) attack, attackers send fake requests that can prevent legitimate users from accessing the system, use resources, such as server processing power, memory, and network bandwidth, and in some cases crash the target system.

Broadly speaking there are two variants of DoS attack. A flood (Read more...)