Amplification Attack

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Amplification attack is a network-based attack where the attacker dramatically increases the bandwidth sent to a victim during a DDoS attack by implementing an amplification factor.

• a type of reflection attack
• targets weaknesses in application protocols to make the attack more effective at consuming network bandwidth
• attacker manipulates the request such that the target is forced to respond with a large amount of data
• amplification factor is the degree to which the attack increases in size
  • i.e.
  • e.g.,
• protocols commonly targeted:
  • DNS, NTP, Connectionless LDAP (CLDAP)
• e.g., of an effective attack
  • exploits memcached database caching system used by web servers