DDoS Threat Report 2019 Q3

DNSSEC (Domain Name System Security Extensions) remain the main driver of growth of DNS amplification attacks in the quarter, yet our analysts have detected a sharp and concerning rise in TCP SYN Flood attacks. TCP SYN Flood is not a new method, but findings indicate that techniques have grown in sophistication and have emerged as the third most used attack vector, behind DNS amplification and HTTP flood attacks.

  • SYN Flood reflection not only hits targeted victims, but also can impact innocent users, including individuals, businesses, and other organizations. As a result, bystanders can incur hefty fees for bandwidth consumed by junk traffic, or even suffer from secondary outages.
  • Even plain-vanilla network attacks could be turned into complex, stealthy attacks leveraging advanced techniques, from the bit-and-piece attacks, also known as carpet bombing.
  • Enterprise networks and telcos must take heed of the resurgence of old threats to avoid junk traffic consuming user bandwidth.
2019_Q3

In Type 1 (56.36% of SYN Flood attacks in Q3), an attacker mobilizes a huge number of random, spoofed IP addresses to send an enormous volume of SYN requests to a single IP, causing the victim server to respond with SYN-ACK packets to voluminous malicious requests. In Type 2 (33.24% of SYN Flood attacks in Q3), an attacker leverages a large, fixed pool of real IP addresses (e.g., servers, routers, IoT devices) to generate malicious SYN packets to hit one destination IP per attack. In Type 3 (10.40% of SYN Flood attacks in Q3), multiple, fixed spoofed-source IPs are used to abuse two destination IPs.

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