When the Cloud
Computing operating system notices the high workload
on the flooded service, it will start to provide
more computational power (more virtual machines,
more service instances...) to cope with the additional
workload. Thus, the server hardware boundaries for
maximum workload to process do no longer hold.
In that sense, the Cloud system is trying to work
against the attacker (by providing more computational
power), but actually—to some extent—even supports
the attacker by enabling him to do most possible
damage on a service’s availability, starting from a
single flooding attack entry point. Thus, the attacker
does not have to flood all n servers that provide a
certain service in target, but merely can flood a single,
Cloud-based address in order to perform a full loss of
availability on the intended service.