Remotely Triggered Black Hole (RTBH) is a common DDoS mitigation approach that has been in use for the last two decades. Usually, it is implemented close to the attack victim in networks sharing some type of physical connectivity. The Unwanted Traffic Removal Service (UTRS) project offers a free, global, and relatively low-effort-to-join and operate RTBH alternative by removing the requirement of physical connectivity. Given these unique value propositions of UTRS, this paper aims to understand to what extent UTRS is adopted and used to mitigate DDoS attacks. To reach this goal, we collected two DDoS datasets describing amplification and Internet-of-Things-botnet-driven attacks and correlated them with the information from the third dataset containing blackholing requests propagated to the members of UTRS. Our findings suggest that, currently, just a small portion of UTRS members (approximately 10 % ) trigger mitigation attempts: out of 1200+ UTRS members, only 124 triggered blackholing events during our study. Among those, with high probability, 25 Autonomous Systems (ASes) reacted on AmpPot attacks mitigating 0.025 % of them globally or 1.03 % targeting UTRS members; 2 countered IoT-botnet-driven attacks alleviating 0.001 % of them globally or 0.06 % targeting UTRS members. This suggests that UTRS can be a useful tool in mitigating DDoS attacks, but it is not widely used.

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Carpet bombing-type DDoS attacks targeting a wide-range network rather than a single IP address have threatened the Internet. Some researchers have investigated the characteristics of single-target DDoS attacks. Still, much less is known about the characteristics of carpet bombing, even the differences between them. In this paper, we profile characteristics of carpet bombing via data from amplification DDoS honeypots and the differences between single-target DRDoS attacks and carpet bombing. We analyze attacks highly concentrated on a specific network on victims, duration, number of packets, ports, and TTLs, and describe the differences between single-target DRDoS attacks and carpet bombing. Our analysis at the level of Autonomous Systems demonstrates that carpet bombing attacks target more hosting networks, including some critical targets, than single-target attacks. We found carpet bombing attacks targeting more “Corporate” networks. We also found that each IP address targeted by carpet bombing receives fewer packets than single-target DRDoS attacks. According to the result of the comparison of attack duration and TTL, carpet bombing lasted longer and referred to having diverse values of TTL in the packets. On the contrary, most single-target DRDoS attacks have a single value of TTL in the packets. This implies carpet bombing has a higher probability of originating from multiple sources. Finally, comparing ports shows that using various ports for Carpet Bombing is highly proportional to single-target DRDoS attacks.

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A lot of research has been devoted to understanding the technical properties of amplification DDoS attacks and the emergence of the DDoS-as-a-service economy, especially the so-called booters. Much less is known about the consequences for victimization patterns. We profile victims via data from amplification DDoS honeypots. We develop victimization rates and present explanatory models capturing key determinants of these rates. Our analysis demonstrates that the bulk of the attacks are directed at users in access networks, not at hosting, and even less at enterprise networks. We find that victimization in broadband ISPs is highly proportional to the number of ISP subscribers and that certain countries have significantly higher or lower victim rates which are only partially explained by institutional factors such as ICT development. We also find that victimization rate in hosting networks is proportional to the number of hosted domains and number of routed IP addresses and that content popularity has a minor impact on victimization rates. Finally, we reflect on the implications of these findings for the wider trend of commoditization in cybercrime.@en