Load Balancer – How Does it Work With the Reconnaissance Phase During Penetration Testing?

Load Balancer basically helps to distribute the network traffic across multiple servers to improve the network and application performance. the Reconnaissance work on target to find out target domain has a load balancer so that penetration testing does not misdirect your probs or attacks.

So It’s recommended to check the domain has a Load balancer, Intrusion Prevention System, Reverse proxy, Firewalls, or content switches all these things will cause false results on security scans.

Load Balancer:

• Load Balancer acts as a reverse proxy that distributes application or network traffic across a number of servers.
• It ensures reliability and availability by monitoring the health of the application and sending a request server or application that can respond in a timely manner.
• Load balancers are found in the network and transport layer (IP, TCP, FTP, UDP) and application layer (HTTP)

Standard Industry Algorithm:

• Round-robin load balancing is one of the simplest methods for distributing client requests across a group of servers. Going down the list of servers in the group, the round-robin load balancer forwards a client request to each server in turn.

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• Does not always result in the accurate or efficient distribution of traffic, because many round-robin load balancers assume that all servers are the same: currently up, currently handling the same load, and with the same storage and computing capacity.
• Weighted round robin – A weight is assigned to each server based on criteria chosen by the site administrator, the most commonly used criterion is the server’s traffic-handling capacity.

• Least Connections: If two servers in a cluster have exactly the same specification, one server can still get overloaded considerably faster than the other.

• Random Connections: load balancer receives a large number of requests, and a Random algorithm will be able to distribute the requests evenly to the nodes.

Load Balancer Check:

• Above figure illustrator that we have successfully found the loadbalancer on the target domain.
• Type lbd followed by the target domain name.Ex: lbd tamilrockers.pl
• We have found HTTP & DNS load balancers for tamilrockers.pl domain.

Before we start penetration testing. It’s mandatory to do this Reconnaissance work on the target domain to detect possible Network & Application Security devices.

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