You’re diving into the more advanced territory of cyberattacks—DRDoS, or Distributed Reflective Denial of Service. It’s a clever and dangerous twist on the traditional DDoS attack. Let’s unpack it:

🪞 What Is a DRDoS Attack?

DRDoS stands for Distributed Reflective Denial of Service. It’s a type of DDoS attack that uses third-party servers to amplify the attack traffic and hide the attacker’s identity.

Instead of sending traffic directly to the victim, the attacker sends requests to legitimate servers (called reflectors) with the victim’s IP address spoofed as the source. These servers then respond to the victim, flooding it with traffic.

🔁 How It Works (Step-by-Step)

1. Spoofing: The attacker sends requests to a reflector server (like a DNS or NTP server), but fakes the source IP to be the victim’s.
2. Reflection: The reflector server replies to the spoofed IP—sending the response to the victim.
3. Amplification: The response is often much larger than the original request, multiplying the impact.
4. Flooding: Thousands of reflectors send amplified responses to the victim, overwhelming its resources.

📈 Amplification Factor

One of the key features of DRDoS is amplification—small requests generate large responses. Here are some common protocols used:

🧯 Why DRDoS Is Dangerous

• Hard to Trace: The attack traffic comes from legitimate servers, not the attacker.
• Highly Amplified: Small effort, massive impact.
• Targets Infrastructure: Can take down websites, DNS servers, or entire networks.

🛡️ How to Defend Against DRDoS

• Rate Limiting: Limit the number of requests per IP.
• Ingress Filtering: ISPs can block spoofed packets.
• Disable Unused Services: Turn off vulnerable protocols like NTP or Chargen if not needed.
• Use DDoS Protection Services: Cloudflare, Akamai, and others can absorb and filter attack traffic.