yusuf-husayn/dos-ddos-lab — explained in plain English
Analysis updated 2026-05-18
Learn how ICMP, SYN, HTTP, and TCP flood attacks work in a safe, isolated lab.
Practice reading network traffic captures in Wireshark before and during an attack.
Study defensive mitigation techniques for common denial of service attack types.
Use as a reference walkthrough for a personal cybersecurity home lab setup.
| yusuf-husayn/dos-ddos-lab | 100/awesome-machine-learning | adam-s/car-diagnosis | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stars | 8 | 8 | 8 |
| Language | Python | Python | Python |
| Last pushed | — | 2024-08-07 | — |
| Maintenance | — | Stale | — |
| Setup difficulty | hard | easy | moderate |
| Complexity | 4/5 | 1/5 | 3/5 |
| Audience | researcher | developer | researcher |
Figures from each repo's GitHub metadata at analysis time.
Requires setting up two virtual machines with isolated networking in VMware or VirtualBox.
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.
An educational lab walking through common DoS and DDoS attack types against an isolated virtual machine, with traffic analysis and defense notes.
Mainly Python. The stack also includes Python, Bash, Wireshark.
Use freely for any purpose, including commercial use, as long as you keep the copyright notice.
Setup difficulty is rated hard, with roughly 1day+ to a first successful run.
Mainly researcher.
This repo across BitVibe Labs
Verify against the repo before relying on details.