Protect your environment from UDP Flood Attacks

Online Gaming: due to low-latency and real-time data transfer capabilities

Live Streaming: Platforms like Twitch, YouTube Live, and Facebook

VoIP (Voice over IP): Many VoIP applications, such as Skype, Zoom

In a UDP attack, the attacker floods a target system or network with a high volume of UDP packets (Traffic). These packets may be sent to specific UDP ports associated with network services or applications on the target, or they may be sent to random ports. The primary goal of a UDP attack is to overwhelm the target’s network infrastructure or application, causing it to become unresponsive or slow.

As UDP sessions are connectionless, the UDP protocol allows for spoofing of source IP address, this brings us to the challenge of how to identify good packets from the bad ones, did we say needle in a haystack?

Connectionless: UDP does not establish a connection between the sender and receiver, making it faster for certain types of data transmission but lacking the built-in error recovery mechanisms of TCP, this makes UDP less secure, as there is no built-in mechanism for verifying the source or destination of the data.

Stateless: UDP is stateless, meaning each packet is treated independently without any knowledge of previous packets. This lack of state tracking makes it harder to detect and mitigate UDP attacks, as there are no sequence numbers or connection tracking mechanisms to rely on.

Amplification Potential: Some UDP-based protocols, like DNS (Domain Name System) and NTP (Network Time Protocol), can be used to launch amplification attacks. In an amplification attack, an attacker sends a small request to a vulnerable UDP server with a spoofed source IP address. The server, unaware of the source IP spoofing, responds with a much larger response to the victim’s IP address. This can result in a significant increase in traffic directed at the victim, overwhelming their network and can cause a denial of service.

Distributed Reflective Attacks: Attackers often use UDP to launch distributed reflective denial-of-service (DRDoS) attacks. These attacks involve sending UDP packets to vulnerable servers with spoofed source IP addresses, causing the servers to respond to the victim’s IP address. This can amplify the attack’s effectiveness and make it difficult to trace the source of the attack.

Behavioral Analysis: Radware Anti-DDoS solutions using behavioral analysis identify abnormal traffic patterns, even in encrypted traffic. This proactive approach helps in early threat detection, decrease false positive and false negative detection, and provide the best protection shield for your environment.

Port filtering: Is a security measure that involves selectively allowing or blocking specific UDP ports to prevent or minimize the impact of potential attacks on a network or a system. There is a short list of known UDP ports such as 53, 68 and 88. The system should support filtering the unknown ports and Real Time Signature ports.

Security Orchestration and Automation: The integration of anti-DDoS solutions with Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) platforms allow for faster and more automated responses to DDoS attacks.

Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Defense: Hybrid and multi-cloud DDoS defense strategies, leveraging the scalability and redundancy of cloud-based mitigation services while maintaining on-premises protection.

Packet Scrubbing and Anomaly Detection: Use defense with packet scrubbing techniques and scrubbing center that discard malformed or suspicious UDP packets. Anomaly detection using advanced algorithms supported by using RFC compliance. These protections provide the validation needed for packet structure and compliance, using these technics filters out non legitimate sources generated using many attack tools.

Known attackers’ protection: Use services that provide your system a dynamic list of known attackers, this service draws intelligence data from variety of sources, like Radware Cloud Security Services. Global Deception Network, which is a global network of honeypots designed to monitor and track malicious traffic. This protection is not bulletproof protection as if the source is spoofed, the attack will pass the protection.

Cloud-Based DDoS Mitigation Services: Engage cloud-based DDoS mitigation services that specialize in detecting and mitigating DDoS attacks. These services have the capacity to absorb and filter out DDoS traffic, leaving legitimate traffic unaffected. Combining Hybrid solution using powerful machine learning, combined with hybrid DDoS mitigation solution allows you to get the best of both worlds – minimum human intervention and maximum peace of mind.

Real Time Signature Protection: Use advanced technics such as real time signature creation algorithms to automatically create dynamic and adaptive defensive signatures, which are tailored to the exact characteristics of attack traffic.