More than 24 million vulnerable home routers are exposing internet service providers to DNS-based amplification attacks.
According to Nominum, in February 2014, over 5.3 million normal home and office routers were secretly used by hackers used to generate attack traffic, accounting for 70 per cent of DNS-based DDoS amplification attacks.
A simple attack can create 10s of Gbps of traffic to disrupt provider networks, enterprises, websites, and individuals anywhere in the world, according to the company, and require little skill or effort and can have a major impact.
The vulnerabilities in the routers are in the Open Domain Name System Proxy, and mask the target of an attack, so it is difficult for ISPs to determine the ultimate destination and recipient of huge waves of amplified traffic.
Sanjay Kapoor, CMO and SVP of strategy at Nominum, said: “Even if ISPs employ best practices to protect their networks, they can still become victims, thanks to the inherent vulnerability in open DNS proxies. ISPs today need more effective protections built-in to DNS servers. Modern DNS servers can precisely target attack traffic without impacting any legitimate DNS traffic.”
According to the Guardian, 800,000 of those routers are based in the UK.
