Akamai’s Prolexic Security Engineering and Response Team (PLXsert) reported that it had observed 14 DDoS campaigns using SNMP amplified reflection since April 11, 2014. SecurityWeek published the account on May 22, 2014; it describes a historical increase, not a current attack trend.
What is an SNMP reflection DDoS attack?
SNMP, the Simple Network Management Protocol, is used to manage and query network devices. In a reflection attack, an attacker sends requests with a victim’s address forged as the apparent source. Devices that answer those requests then send their replies to the victim instead of to the attacker. If the replies are larger than the requests, the devices amplify the traffic reaching the target.
SecurityWeek’s 2014 report said attackers automated SNMP GetBulk requests to prompt devices to return stored data toward the target. The devices therefore acted as reflectors, while the attacker used them to generate traffic against someone else.
What did Akamai observe in 2014?
SecurityWeek reported that PLXsert had seen a significant uptick in these attacks since April 11, 2014, and had observed 14 DDoS campaigns using SNMP amplified reflection during that period. The report provides no percentage increase, traffic-volume measurement, or baseline for comparison, so the figure does not establish how large the increase was.
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The report said devices supporting SNMP v2 were most often used. It identified gaming, hosting companies, and nonprofits among the targeted sectors, and the United States and China as the main source countries observed in those campaigns. These details describe the campaigns in the 2014 report only; they are not current prevalence data.
Why did Akamai say the attacks were increasing?
SecurityWeek quoted Akamai senior vice president and general manager for the Security Business Unit Stuart Scholly as saying, “Newly available SNMP reflection tools have fueled these attacks.” The report also quoted him saying, “Network administrators can help prevent more devices from being found and used by malicious actors.” These statements were reproduced in the 2014 news article and were not independently checked against the original advisory.
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What did Akamai advise administrators to do?
As reported by SecurityWeek in May 2014, Akamai advised administrators to identify devices using SNMP v2 and turn off public access. The article quoted the advisory: “To stop these older devices from participating in attacks, network administrators need to check for the presence of this protocol and turn off public access.” In practical terms, the advice was to find devices exposing SNMP to the public internet and restrict that access so they could not be used as reflectors.
The report also quoted the advisory as saying, “Devices using SNMP v3 are more secure.” That is a comparative statement from the 2014 advisory as reproduced by SecurityWeek, not a claim that enabling SNMP v3 alone constitutes a complete present-day security plan.
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What this report does—and does not—establish
Brian Prince’s SecurityWeek article, published May 22, 2014, is a secondary account of observations attributed to Akamai’s PLXsert and a summary of Akamai’s advisory. It documents a reported cluster of campaigns in spring 2014. It does not establish how common SNMP reflection attacks are today, describe current mitigation standards, or compare DDoS protection services.
Read the SecurityWeek report by Brian Prince (May 22, 2014).
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