Security News > 2021 > August > Web Censorship Systems Can Facilitate Massive DDoS Attacks

Researchers are warning internet censorship systems are ripe for abuse by a new type of distributed denial of service attack.

The potential for abuse is concerning, researchers say, because attacks would take advantage of a type of reflection and amplification, which would be "Extremely detrimental to any network" if carried out.

Netscout, which detailed the attack vector, dubbed the type of DDoS attack a Middlebox HTTP Reflection/Amplification misconfiguration vulnerability.

They say attacks can produce DDoS volumes as high as a 700,000 to 1 amplification factor.

Along with the risk of systems leveraged in massive DDoS attacks the censorship systems themselves would also be crippled, with traffic analysis tools knocked offline and permitted traffic blocked, according to researchers.

Netscout says many censorship systems are "Suboptimal" in design and "Implementation decisions allow spoofed requests for denied FQDNs and/or URIs to be synthesized by attackers in much the same way as other well-known reflection/amplification DDoS vectors." This, they say results in amplified HTTP responses being directed towards the intended targets of the attack.

News URL

https://threatpost.com/censorship-systems-ddos-attacks/168853/