## Index → Modules → Handlers

## Handler: Drop Connection

This handler immediately drops the TCP connection without replying anything whatsoever.

This handler can be used as security measure against some types of attack. For instance, an an error in the PHP and Java floating point library could be exploited to cause a denial of service against a web service. Under certain circumstances, attempting to convert the string 2.2250738585072011e-308 into a floating point value can hang the PHP runtime. Similarly, the Java runtime (and compiler) suffer from a related problem.

By filtering incoming traffic and using this handler, requests that may seek to exploit this fault can be safely discarded.

Tip | Any application code that parses input into a floating point could be vulnerable. More importantly, the family of Accept HTTP headers use floating point scores that could be exploited on certain implementations. To prevent this problem, a solution could be to create a Header-type rule that matches the 2250738585072011 string and discards the requests.