THE WEB SERVER VULNERABILITIES.

Running head: WEB SERVER VULNERABILITIES
Web Server Vulnerabilities
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WEB SERVER VULNERABILITIES
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Introduction
The internet is the mainly dependent on the webservers that host the resources required
by the webservers. Thus, in order to interrupt the services provided by these servers the attackers
carry out different attacks by targeting the web servers and exploiting the vulnerabilities in the
application in order to gain access to the server (Tripathi et al 2016). The report contributes to
the discussion about the different types of attacks, comparison of best practices for security
measures. Furthermore, recommendation for securing the servers are also provided in the report.
Types of Webserver attacks
DoS (Denial of Service Attacks)
In case Denial of service attack (DOS) attacks, the servers become down and is unable to
serve the response against the requests by users. This kind of attack can be performed through
the use of numerous means. One of the most effective technique is buffer over flow. DOS attacks
mainly intended to overwhelm the server by sending invalid and malicious data packets or
requests (Ben-Asher et al 2015). With the huge amount of the requests the server gets flooded
and leads to the crash of the server as well as application running on the servers. As blocking the
complete network traffic may lead to the loss of access to intended users thus it is required to
take mitigation measure to protect the servers. Denial of service attacks are also categorized in
following three categories Application layer attack, volume attack and finally protocol attack.

WEB SERVER VULNERABILITIES
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Figure 1: Denial of service attack model
(Source: Tripathi et al 2016)
This DoS Attack depends on the multiple machines that operates in collaboration in
order to carry out the attack on some network or site. Through this attack model, it causes
enormous amount of network traffic that is sent to a targeted server that tries forge attacking
packets on the server. Attacker may also use distributed network of computers in order to carry
out the attack while exploiting the security vulnerabilities. From the acquired control over the
computers in a distributed network the attacker forces computers in order to send huge amounts
of data or requests to servers.