Security News > 2022 > March > Hackers Abuse Mitel Devices to Amplify DDoS Attacks by 4 Billion Times

The attack vector - dubbed TP240PhoneHome - has been weaponized to launch significant DDoS attacks targeting broadband access ISPs, financial institutions, logistics companies, gaming firms, and other organizations.

"Attackers were actively leveraging these systems to launch reflection/amplification DDoS attacks of more than 53 million packets per second."

DDoS reflection attacks typically involve spoofing the IP address of a victim to redirect responses from a target such as DNS, NTP, or CLDAP server in such a manner that the replies sent to the spoofed sender are much bigger than the requests, leading to complete inaccessibility of the service.

First sign of the attacks is said to have been detected on February 18, 2022 using Mitel's MiCollab and MiVoice Business Express collaboration systems as DDoS reflectors, courtesy the inadvertent exposure of an unauthenticated test facility to the public internet.

"This particular attack vector differs from most UDP reflection/amplification attack methodologies in that the exposed system test facility can be abused to launch a sustained DDoS attack of up to 14 hours in duration by means of a single spoofed attack initiation packet, resulting in a record-setting packet amplification ratio of 4,294,967,296:1."

"The collateral impact of TP-240 reflection/amplification attacks is potentially significant for organizations with internet-exposed Mitel MiCollab and MiVoice Business Express collaboration systems that are abused as DDoS reflectors/amplifiers," the company said.

News URL

https://thehackernews.com/2022/03/hackers-abuse-mitel-devices-to-amplify.html