yusuf-husayn/dos-ddos-lab

This project is a documented cybersecurity training lab, not a tool you install and run against a real target. It walks through how Denial of Service and Distributed Denial of Service attacks work, using two virtual machines that only talk to each other on a private, isolated network built with VMware. One virtual machine, running Kali Linux, plays the attacker. The other, running Metasploitable2, a virtual machine intentionally built with security weaknesses for practice, plays the victim. The author walks through several attack types, including ICMP floods, SYN floods, HTTP floods, TCP floods, and a technique called Ping of Death, each aimed at overwhelming the target machine so its web service becomes unresponsive to normal requests. A distributed version of each attack is simulated by running several flood processes at once from the same attacking machine using tmux, a terminal tool that manages multiple sessions at once, rather than using genuinely separate physical machines. The author is upfront that this is a scope limitation of the lab, not a claim of a true distributed attack. Every stage of the lab is captured and analyzed with Wireshark, a network traffic analysis tool, and compared against a baseline capture taken before any attack traffic was sent, so the effect of each attack on network traffic patterns can be clearly seen. The repository includes the Bash and Python scripts used to automate the flood processes, screenshots of each stage, and a discussion of mitigation techniques, meaning ways a real system administrator could defend against these attacks. The author states clearly that everything here was run inside an isolated lab network for educational and defensive security purposes, and that no attacks were carried out against public or third party systems. The project is released under the MIT license.