DISTRIBUTED DENIAL OF SERVICE (DDOS) NETWORK ATTACKS: IMPACT ON THE VIRTUAL LEARNING ENVIRONMENT

Attacks on network services in the form of Denial of Service (DoS), Distributed DoS (DDoS), and Low-rate DoS (LDoS) are becoming more rampant in occurrence and grievous in consequence. The Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) is susceptible to this class of attacks, and as such a need for developing robust schemes, algorithms and techniques aimed at pre-empting such attacks and subsequently reducing the vulnerability of networks is of paramount importance. A variety of such techniques are currently available, and more are at the developmental stage. We present in this paper an overview of the most popular schemes currently reported in the literature in the case of DDoS for proactive detection and evasion of these attacks, while making informed recommendations of applicability of each to specific network scenarios. Mitigating techniques for dealing with each identified attack are also proffered, with a view to ensuring undisrupted learning experience in the VLE domain.