Incident Response, TDR

Hijacked anti-DDoS servers used to carry out massive DDoS attack

A massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) was carried out earlier this month using very servers designed to prevent the classic type of attack.

In early May, website security company Incapsula was able to help fend off a powerful DDoS attack that was launched using high-capacity servers hijacked from two separate DDoS protection services providers.

The attack, which occurred on May 1 against an unnamed online gaming website, went on for about seven hours and remained at a steady 25 million packets per second (mpps) throughout its duration, Igal Zeifman, product evangelist with Incapsula, told SCMagazine.com in a Monday email correspondence.

The perpetrators hijacked and leveraged the power of two separate high-capacity servers belonging to unnamed DDoS protection services providers, Zeifman said. He explained that this type of strong network infrastructure, built to defend against volumetric attacks, offers attackers a way to “fight fire with fire.”

Because many of the DNS queries held non-spoofed IP data, Incapsula was able to determine that the compromised DDoS protection services providers were located in Canada and China, Zeifman said, adding that the companies confirmed to Incapsula that its servers were used in the attacks.

“Because mitigation is all about filtering of incoming requests, ongoing traffic tends to be overlooked,” Zeifman said. “In this case, we actually had to notify the DDoS protection providers, for them to notice the outgoing floods from their servers.”

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