DoS Amplification Attacks - Protocol-Agnostic Detection of Service Abuse in Amplifier Networks

For many years Distributed Denial-of-Service attacks have been known to be a threat to Internet services. Recently a configuration flaw in NTP daemons led to attacks with traffic rates of several hundred Gbit/s. For those attacks a third party, the amplifier, is used to significantly increase the volume of traffic reflected to the victim. Recent research revealed more UDP-based protocols that are vulnerable to amplification attacks. Detecting such attacks from an abused amplifier network’s point of view has only rarely been investigated.