DDoS attacks are getting stronger, and they happen more often every year. With the technology advance, there are many more connected devices out there. Billions of mobile phones and many “smart” connected gadgets are easily hackable. As IoT (internet of things) is getting more popular, but not secure enough, this danger will keep rising.
These attacks usually use the UDP protocol. It is a simple connectionless communication model with a minimum of protocol mechanism. This means that one of the sides in the communication can send large amount to the other without restrictions. Without any confirmation and it doesn’t matter if the second side receive the data.
Due to the way the UDP protocol works, cyber-criminals use it to generate DDoS amplification attacks. The attacker sends a small UDP request with a spoofed IP address of the victim to public services.
The UDP protocol doesn’t require a connection verification between the parties. This is why the public services reply with the requested data to the IP address of the victim. As bigger is the data returned by exploited public service, bigger is the DDoS amplification factor.