Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attackers are using a new technique to knock websites offline by targeting vulnerable ‘middleboxes’, such as firewalls, to amplify junk traffic attacks.
Amplification attacks are nothing new and have helped attackers knock over servers with short busts of traffic as high as 3.47 Tbps. Microsoft last year mitigated attacks on this scale that were the result of competition between online-gaming players.
But there’s a new attack on the horizon. Akamai, a content distribution network firm, says it has seen a recent wave of attacks using “TCP Middlebox Reflection”, referring to transmission control protocol (TCP) – a founding protocol for secured communications on the internet between networked machines. The attacks reached 11 Gbps at 1.5 million packets per second (Mpps), according to Akamai.
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Source: ZDNet