A Detailed Classification of Flash Events: Client, Server and Network Characteristics

Flash Events is the situation, when many users simultaneously access a computer server. Distributed denial of-service (DDoS) attacks are similar to flash Events, but the only difference is users´ intention. The attackers mimic Flash crowds to avoid their detection, thus it has been a rapidly growing problem in Network Security to accurately detect the DDoS attacks. Due to the overwhelming variety of DDoS attacks and Flash Events (FE), it is very difficult to distinguish them from one another. Our problem space of distinguishing Flash Events from DDoS has become large, but the solution space is yet very summarized, because very less work has been done on identifying the variety of Flash Events. This paper presents classification of Flash Events, and thus provides researchers with a better understanding of the problem space, so that it´d be easy for the researchers to work on distinguishing variety of DDoS attacks from variety of Flash Events.