Distributed denial of service attacks that take advantage of misconfigured NTP servers were up 276 percent last quarter compared to the same time last year, reaching a new record high, according to a new report.
Part of the reason for the increase is economics, said report editor Martin McKeay, security advocate at Akamai Technologies.
In an NTP reflection campaign, the attacker sends a short message to an NTP server, and the NTP server replies with a significantly longer message. But instead of going back to the attacker, the response is addressed to the victim of the attack.
This allows the attacker to significantly magnify the amount of traffic hitting the victim all at once.
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