DDoS attacks reach new level of sophistication

Prolexic Technologies warned of an escalating threat from unusually large and highly sophisticated DDoS attacks.

The DDoS attacks have been launched in the last week using the so-called itsoknoproblembro DDoS toolkit. The malicious actor(s) behind the attacks have used this potent tool in conjunction with sophisticated attack methods that clearly demonstrate knowledge of common DDoS mitigation methods.

The attack signatures are extremely complex and Prolexic has recorded sustained floods peaking at 70 Gbps and more than 30 million pps against some of its customers. Most mitigation providers would struggle to combat DDoS attacks with these characteristics.

The itsoknoproblembro toolkit includes multiple infrastructure and application-layer attack vectors, such as SYN floods, that can simultaneously attack multiple destination ports and targets, as well as ICMP, UDP and SSL encrypted attack types. A common characteristic of the attacks is a large UDP flood targeting DNS infrastructures.

Uniquely, the attacking botnet contains many legitimate (non-spoofed) IP addresses, enabling the attack to bypass most anti-spoofing mechanisms.