A DRDoS attack results in a distributed attack which can be initiated by one or multiple attacker nodes.' Advertisementįurther Reading New DoS attacks taking down game sites deliver crippling 100Gbps floodsDos amplification techniques are by no means new. The attacker does this by exploiting network protocols which are vulnerable to IP spoofing. 'Instead he/she sends it to amplifiers which reflect the traffic to the victim. 'An attacker which initiates a DRDoS does not send the traffic directly to the victim,' researchers wrote in a research paper recently presented at the 9th Usenix Workshop on Offensive Technologies.

By replacing the attacker's IP address in the malicious request with the spoofed address of the target, the attacker causes the data flood to hit victim's computer. Key to making the attack possible is BitTorrent's use of the user datagram protocol, which provides no mechanism to prevent the falsifying of IP addresses. The BitTorrent applications receiving the request, in turn, flood a third-party target with data that's 50 to 120 times bigger than the original request. DRDoS allows a single BitTorrent user with only modest amounts of bandwidth to send malformed requests to other BitTorrent users. But it turns out that features found uTorrent, Mainline, and Vuze make them especially suitable for the technique. The distributed reflective DoS (DRDoS) attacks exploit weaknesses found in the open BitTorrent protocol, which millions of people rely on to exchange files over the Internet. Some of the most widely used BitTorrent applications, including uTorrent, Mainline, and Vuze are also the most vulnerable to a newly discovered form of denial of service attack that makes it easy for a single person to bring down large sites.

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