DDoS Threat Report 2018 Q1

Looking at the historical landscape clearly shows cyber perpetrators dogged pursuit of stronger firepower. Two waves of amplification attacks have come to the forefront recently: The first wave consisted of DNSSEC Amplification attacks observed in our Q4 2017 Threat Report, while the second one appeared this quarter in the form of Memcached attacks.

  • DNS Amplification attacks surged 201.42% quarter-on-quarter (QoQ) and 660.92% year-on-year (YoY).
  • 55 of the attacks were due to exploited Memcached servers.
  • The amplification factor of attacks leveraging Memcached servers can go as high as 51,000X.
  • Two-vector attacks were primarily NTP and DNS Amplification attacks using UDP in a volumetric role.
2018Q1

Nexusguard’s honeypot collected lots of information about Memcached attacks. Source IPs gathered from the scanning logs are believed to be bot/attacker IPs since valid addresses had to be used to check the Memcached server and accept return traffic. The attack log shows that perpetrators spoofed the source IP to the victim IP so the Memcached server would forward attack traffic directly to victims.

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