Okay, here’s my blog post about my “ruidoso flooding” experiment:
So, I got this idea the other day, right? I was reading about network attacks and stumbled upon this thing called “flooding.” It’s basically overwhelming a system with a ton of requests so it can’t handle real traffic. And then I thought, “I wonder if I could do that… ethically, of course, just to see how it works.” I decided to use a tool call “Ruidoso”, which is a command line tool for pentesting. I’ll to test it out on my OWN network. Do NOT try this on anything you don’t own or have permission to mess with.
First things first, I needed a target. Now, I’m not crazy, so I’m not going to target, like, my bank or anything. I set up a virtual machine – basically, a computer inside my computer – running a simple web server. This is my guinea pig. It’s completely isolated, so if I break it, no big deal.
Getting Started with Ruidoso
Then, I had to get the “ruidoso” tool. The official tool can be found on Github, you can download according to their instructions, the process is very simple.
Once I had everything set up, I opened up my terminal. This is where the magic happens. It’s like the command center for your computer. I’m a bit of a command-line junkie, so I felt right at home.
The Flood Begins
Now, the fun part. I used Ruidoso to start sending a flood of requests to my virtual machine’s web server. It will look like this:
bash
./ruidoso -t 192.168.1.100 -p 80 -d 60
Let me explain the parts:
- ./ruidoso: This is the tool command.
- -t 192.168.1.100: That’s the IP address of my virtual machine. It’s like its unique identifier on my network.
- -p 80: This is the port number. Think of it like a door on the computer. Port 80 is the standard door for web traffic.
- -d 60:This means how long time I want it to run(in seconds).
I fired it up, and bam! My terminal started spitting out a stream of data. It was like watching a digital waterfall. Ruidoso was sending request after request to my poor little virtual machine.
Watching the Results
I kept an eye on my virtual machine’s resource monitor – basically, a graph showing how hard it’s working. And sure enough, the CPU usage started to climb. And climb. And climb. It went from a chill little green line to a massive red spike. The web server was getting hammered!
I tried to access the website running on the virtual machine from my main computer. And… nothing. It was like trying to get through a door during a Black Friday sale. The server was so busy dealing with the fake requests from Ruidoso that it couldn’t handle my legitimate one.
Wrapping Up
I let the “flood” run for a minute or two, then I stopped it. The virtual machine’s CPU usage slowly went back to normal. It was like it had just run a marathon and was finally catching its breath.
So, that was my little flooding experiment. It was pretty eye-opening to see how easy it is to disrupt a service with a relatively simple tool. Again, I can’t stress this enough: don’t do this to anything you don’t have permission to test. It’s illegal and you could get into serious trouble. But, as a controlled experiment on my own network, it was a valuable learning experience.
