14 DAY TRIAL // Host Exploit – a company that focuses many of its efforts on the malicious activities that target Internet hosts and registrars – has released its World Host Report for the third quarter of 2012.
The report places the spotlight on misconfigured DNS resolvers, also known as “open resolvers,” which are often leveraged by cybercriminals to amplify the distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks they launch.
“DDoS amplification is used far more frequently now and to devastating effect. By amplifying a DDoS attack a targeted website can be overwhelmed by its power causing system failure and service interruption,” Bryn Thompson of Host Exploit explained in a blog post.
The expert highlights the fact that cyberattacks which leverage open resolvers have another advantage. By abusing these resolvers, the attackers can actually mask the origins of the attacks.
Some time ago, CloudFlare detailed these high-intensity DDOS attacks and also suggested a number of mitigation techniques.
However, it’s obvious from Host Exploit’s report that these attacks are becoming more and more popular among cybercriminals.
The complete Q3 2012 World Hosts Report from Host Exploit (in collaboration with Group-IV and CSIS) is available here.