By Marcos Colon

A popular attack technique has once again evolved as cyber criminals are abusing Connection-less LDAP to launch distributed denial-of-service attacks.

Attackers previously relied on DNS, SNMP, and NTP to enable DDoS assaults, but now they’ve shifted their methods to this version of the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol that companies use for directory services.

Experts at security firm Akamai say the company’s security operation center began mitigating these attacks in October, according to a recent advisory. These new attacks are “comparable” to DNS reflection attacks in size, seeing as most exceed 1Gbps.

“While the gaming industry is typically the most targeted industry for attacks, observed cldap attacks have mostly been targeting the software and technology industry with six other industries,” according to Wednesday’s advisory.