Application-Level Denial of Service (DoS) attacks are a threat to nearly everyone hosting content on the Internet. DoS attacks are simple to launch, but are often very difficult to defend against. Modern websites are a diverse set of moving parts, and a malicious actor only needs to find the point at which any one of these systems is overwhelmed to bring your website to a halt.
Organizations may approach this problem by increasing capacity, perhaps leveraging the cloud to expand horizontally. This can be a successful short term mitigation strategy, but a combined historic and real-time view of who is accessing your website (and why) gives you the chance to actively defend as opposed to simply absorbing the traffic. Trending this data over time allows your response time to decrease while keeping your front door open. In this talk I will present a new open source project, written primarily in Node.js, that can be used as a defense framework for mitigating these attacks.