Arbor reports unprecedented spike in DDoS attack size driven by NTP misuse

DUBAI, UAE: Arbor Networks Inc., a leading provider of DDoS and advanced threat protection solutions for enterprise and service provider networks, today released global DDoS attack data derived from its ATLAS threat monitoring infrastructure.

The data shows an unprecedented spike in volumetric attacks, driven by the proliferation of NTP reflection/amplification attacks.

NTP is a UDP-based protocol used to synchronize clocks over a computer network. Any UDP-based service including DNS, SNMP, NTP, chargen, and RADIUS is a potential vector for DDoS attacks because the protocol is connectionless and source IP addresses can be spoofed by attackers who have control of compromised or ‘botted' hosts residing on networks which have not implemented basic anti-spoofing measures.

NTP is popular due to its high amplification ratio of approximately 1000x. Furthermore, attacks tools are becoming readily available, making these attacks easy to execute.

ATLAS is a collaborative partnership with nearly 300 service provider customers who share anonymous traffic data with Arbor in order to deliver a comprehensive, aggregated view of global traffic and threats. ATLAS collects 80TB/sec of traffic and provides the data for the Digital Attack Map, a visualization of global attack traffic created by Google Ideas.