Akamai Wednesday revealed that it’s witnessed the fourth-largest DDoS attack the company has ever encountered, leveraging a widespread and highly exploitable UDP amplification technique known as WS-Discovery (WSD).
WSD—a consumer device network discovery and connectivity technology—was seen targeting one of Akamai’s customers in the gaming industry, according to a blog post attributed to Akamai Security Intelligence Response Team Engineer Jonathan Respeto.
Attacks targeting networks using this method are critical for two key reasons, researchers said. One is that it allows for high-volume attacks, with amplification rates of up to 15,300 percent of the original byte size.
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