Fingerprinting Internet DNS Amplification DDoS Activities
This work addresses the problem of improving cybersecurity intelligence for network defenders by providing a method to extract detailed insights on DNS amplification DDoS attacks, though it is incremental as it builds on prior darknet-based DDoS inference research.
The paper tackles the problem of detecting and characterizing DNS amplification DDoS attacks by proposing a novel approach that uses darknet data without relying on backscattered analysis, successfully inferring significant activities including a recent prominent attack and uncovering previously undocumented high-speed and stealthy attempts.
This work proposes a novel approach to infer and characterize Internet-scale DNS amplification DDoS attacks by leveraging the darknet space. Complementary to the pioneer work on inferring Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) activities using darknet, this work shows that we can extract DDoS activities without relying on backscattered analysis. The aim of this work is to extract cyber security intelligence related to DNS Amplification DDoS activities such as detection period, attack duration, intensity, packet size, rate and geo-location in addition to various network-layer and flow-based insights. To achieve this task, the proposed approach exploits certain DDoS parameters to detect the attacks. We empirically evaluate the proposed approach using 720 GB of real darknet data collected from a /13 address space during a recent three months period. Our analysis reveals that the approach was successful in inferring significant DNS amplification DDoS activities including the recent prominent attack that targeted one of the largest anti-spam organizations. Moreover, the analysis disclosed the mechanism of such DNS amplification DDoS attacks. Further, the results uncover high-speed and stealthy attempts that were never previously documented. The case study of the largest DDoS attack in history lead to a better understanding of the nature and scale of this threat and can generate inferences that could contribute in detecting, preventing, assessing, mitigating and even attributing of DNS amplification DDoS activities.