An Analysis of Using Reflectors

In a distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack, the attacker compromises a number of slaves and installs flooding servers on them, later contacting the set of servers to combine their transmission power in an orchestrated flooding attack. The use of a large number of slaves both augments the power of the attack and complicates defending against it: the dilution of locality in the flooding stream makes it more difficult for the victim to isolate the attack traffic in order to block it, and also undermines the potential effectiveness of traceback techniques for locating the source of streams of packets with spoofed source addresses.

An Analysis of Using Reflectors