Patent ID: 7640591

Claim:
A method for controlling a denial of service attack on a host comprising: receiving a plurality of packets from a network; identifying an attacking host based on a severity level of the denial of service (DOS) attack from the network; automatically re-configuring, in response to the identifying, a classifier to forward each of the plurality of packets associated with the attacking host to a temporary data structure associated with the severity level of the DOS attack, wherein the classifier is located on a physical network interface card operatively connected to the host, wherein the temporary data structure is one of a plurality of temporary data structures on the host, wherein each of the plurality of temporary data structures is associated with one of a plurality of severity levels, and wherein the attacking host is identified using an identifying attack characteristic; identifying, by the classifier, each of the plurality of packets associated with the identifying attack characteristic; forwarding each of the identified plurality of packets associated with the identifying attack characteristic to the temporary data structure; requesting, by the host, a number of packets from the temporary data structure to be placed in a virtual serialization queue, wherein the virtual serialization queue is associated with the temporary data structure; forwarding the number of packets to the virtual serialization queue; and creating a virtual network stack prior to receiving the plurality of packets from the network, wherein the virtual serialization queue is associated with a virtual network stack matching the severity level; wherein creating the virtual network stack comprises: creating the virtual serialization queue; binding the virtual serialization queue to a central processing unit; binding the virtual serialization queue to a packet destination; creating a virtual network interface card (NIC); binding the virtual serialization queue to the virtual NIC and a virtual protocol stack to obtain the virtual network stack; and specifying the severity level associated with the virtual serialization queue.