Yesterday’s non-issue, todays record breaker…

How open memcached quickly escalated to a record breaking DDoS vehicle.

In my previous column I already described the amplification phenomenon that is used in modern DDoS attacks to turn a small traffic stream into a large one. In short, the criminals that launch DDoS attacks send small requests to publicly exposed services and spoof the originating IP address. These services then reply to the spoofed source address with a reply that is much larger then the original request, therefor amplifying the attack traffic.