It’s bad enough, the authors wrote, that these hosts can be abused by existing attacks, but they can also facilitate new distributed denial of service (DDoS) amplification attacks, the researchers discovered. One concentrates traffic in time, and another loops packets between vulnerable hosts, resulting in an amplification factor of at least 16 and 75, respectively.
In addition, the hosts can be hit with what the authors call an Economic Denial of Sustainability (EDoS) attack, in which the outgoing bandwidth of a host is drained, or an Administrative Denial of Service, in which the vulnerable hosts send traffic that causes the recipient to file an abuse report with the host’s ISP, possibly leading to its account being suspended.
Defenses
However, CISOs are not without defenses, the paper says.
