Understanding the Threat of TCP Amplification in DDoS Attacks

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are a particularly annoying type of attack since they can cause damage to a target system without the victim having done anything “wrong”. Unlike many types of cyberattacks, which can be traced back to the failure to apply a patch for a known vulnerability or human employees falling for a phishing attack, the only things that a DDoS victim do to make them vulnerable to attack are having a web presence and failing to deploy a DDoS protection solution. DDoS attackers are constantly working to evolve their attacks to slip past the protections that organizations deploy on their networks. A recent development in DDoS attacks is the use of TCP reflection attacks as a DDoS amplifier.