Apple’s Lion vs Microsoft’s Windows 7: Comparing Built-In Protection against ICMP Flood Attacks

With the increase in the number of computers connected to Internet, the number of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks has also been increasing. A DDoS attack consumes the computing resources of a computer or a server, by degrading its computing performance or by preventing legitimate users from accessing its services. Recently, Operating Systems (OS) are increasingly deploying embedded DDoS prevention schemes to prevent computing exhaustion caused by such attacks. In this paper, we compare the effectiveness of two popular operating systems, namely the Apple’s Lion and Microsoft’s Windows 7, against DDoS attacks. We compare the computing performance of these operating systems under two ICMP based DDoS attacks. Since the role of the OS is to manage the computer or servers resources as efficiently as possible, in this paper we investigate which OS manages its computing resources more efficiently. In this paper, we evaluate and compare the built-in security of these two operating systems by using an iMac computer which is capable of running both Windows 7 and Lion. The DDoS attacks that are simulated for this paper are the ICMP Ping and Land Attack. For this experiment, we measure the exhaustion of the processors and the number of Echo Request and Echo Reply messages that were generated under varying attack loads for both the Ping and Land Attack. From our experiments, we found that both operating systems were able to survive the attacks however they reacted a bit differently under attack. The Operating System Lion was handling both the Ping and Land attack in the exactly the same way, whereas Windows 7 handled the two attacks a bit differently, resulting in different processor consumptions by two different operating systems.

McAfee SecurityCenter Evaluation under DDoS Attack Traffic

During the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, computers are made to attack other computers. Newer Firewalls now days are providing prevention against such attack traffics. McAfee SecurityCenter Firewall is one of the most popular security software installed on millions of Internet connected computers worldwide. “McAfee claims that if you have installed McAfee SecurityCentre with anti-virus and antispyware and Firewall then you always have the most current security to combat the ever-evolving threats on the Internet for the duration of the subscription”. In this paper, we present our findings regarding the effectiveness of McAfee SecurityCentre software against some of the popular Distributed Denial Of Service (DDoS) attacks, namely ARP Flood, Ping-flood, ICMP Land, TCP-SYN Flood and UDP Flood attacks on the computer which has McAfee SecurityCentre installed. The McAfee SecurityCentre software has an in built firewall which can be activated to control and filter the Inbound/Outbound traffic. It can also block the Ping Requests in order to stop or subside the Ping based DDoS Attacks. To test the McAfee Security Centre software, we created the corresponding attack traffic in a controlled lab environment. It was found that the McAfee Firewall software itself was incurring DoS (Denial of Service) by completely exhausting the available memory resources of the host computer during its operation to stop the external DDoS Attacks.