SERVER WITH MECHANISM FOR REDUCING INTERNAL RESOURCES ASSOCIATED WITH A SELECTED CLIENT CONNECTION

According to certain non-limiting embodiments disclosed herein, the functionality of a server is extended with a mechanism for identifying connections with clients that have exhibited attack characteristics (for example, characteristics indicating a DoS attack), and for transitioning internal ownership of those connections such that server resources consumed by the connection are reduced, while keeping the connection open. The connection thus moves from a state of relatively high resource use to a state of relatively low server resource use, and the server is able to free resources such as memory and processing cycles previously allocated to the connection. In some cases, the server maintains the connection for at least some time and uses it to keep the client occupied so that it cannot launch-or has fewer resources to launch-further attacks, and possibly to gather information about the attacking client.