Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

SecurityWeekSecurityWeek

Network Security

CloudFlare Infrastructure Hit With 400Gbs NTP-Based DDoS Attack

Web performance and security firm CloudFlare said late Monday that a customer running on its platform was hit with a massive DDoS attack today that affected service in much of Europe and then into some of its US infrastructure.

Web performance and security firm CloudFlare said late Monday that a customer running on its platform was hit with a massive DDoS attack today that affected service in much of Europe and then into some of its US infrastructure.

“It was a very large DDoS targeting a CloudFlare customer,” Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare told SecurityWeek. “We’re still gathering the log data to get exact numbers but know it was well over 300Gbps and likely over 400Gbps,” Prince said.

“The method was NTP reflection, which is quickly replacing DNS reflection as the source of the largest attacks,” Prince said. 

NTP stands for Network Time Protocol, which runs over port 123 and is used to synchronize clocks between machines on a network. In December, researchers at Symantec noticed an uptick of attacks targeting the protocol.

“NTP is effective as an amplification source because the responses can be hundreds of times the size of the queries,” Prince explained. “This means that an attacker with a list of a relatively small number of vulnerable NTP servers can generate a large attack. Generally, you only need about 1/10th the number of misconfigured NTP servers as you do open DNS resolvers to launch an attack of the same size.”

US-CERT warned about these types of distributed denial-of-service attacks earlier this year. 

“We were able to largely mitigate the attack across our global network,” Prince added. “We did see congestion in Europe that caused some slowness in the region. We’re continuing to add capacity worldwide to stay ahead of ever larger attacks we’re seeing.”

CloudFlare did not name the customer that was targeted in this particular attack. 

Advertisement. Scroll to continue reading.

CloudFlare, which is usually quite transparent about its operations, will likely share more details as the attack is analyzed and mitigated.

Written By

For more than 15 years, Mike Lennon has been closely monitoring the threat landscape and analyzing trends in the National Security and enterprise cybersecurity space. In his role at SecurityWeek, he oversees the editorial direction of the publication and is the Director of several leading security industry conferences around the world.

Click to comment

Trending

Daily Briefing Newsletter

Subscribe to the SecurityWeek Email Briefing to stay informed on the latest threats, trends, and technology, along with insightful columns from industry experts.

Understand how to go beyond effectively communicating new security strategies and recommendations.

Register

Join us for an in depth exploration of the critical nature of software and vendor supply chain security issues with a focus on understanding how attacks against identity infrastructure come with major cascading effects.

Register

Expert Insights

Related Content

Identity & Access

Zero trust is not a replacement for identity and access management (IAM), but is the extension of IAM principles from people to everyone and...

Malware & Threats

The NSA and FBI warn that a Chinese state-sponsored APT called BlackTech is hacking into network edge devices and using firmware implants to silently...

Cybersecurity Funding

Network security provider Corsa Security last week announced that it has raised $10 million from Roadmap Capital. To date, the company has raised $50...

Network Security

Attack surface management is nothing short of a complete methodology for providing effective cybersecurity. It doesn’t seek to protect everything, but concentrates on areas...

Identity & Access

Hackers rarely hack in anymore. They log in using stolen, weak, default, or otherwise compromised credentials. That’s why it’s so critical to break the...

Application Security

Virtualization technology giant VMware on Tuesday shipped urgent updates to fix a trio of security problems in multiple software products, including a virtual machine...

Application Security

Fortinet on Monday issued an emergency patch to cover a severe vulnerability in its FortiOS SSL-VPN product, warning that hackers have already exploited the...

Cyberwarfare

Websites of German airports, administration bodies and banks were hit by DDoS attacks attributed to Russian hacker group Killnet