syn flood attacks from NL-based netblocks

Sat Aug 17 22:16:33 UTC 2019

On Fri, Aug 16, 2019 at 3:05 PM Jim Shankland <nanog at shankland.org> wrote:

> I'm seeing slow-motion (a few per second, per IP/port pair) syn flood
> attacks ostensibly originating from 3 NL-based IP blocks: 88.208.0.0/18
> , 5.11.80.0/21, and 78.140.128.0/18 ("ostensibly" because ... syn flood,
> and BCP 38 not yet fully adopted).
>
> Is anybody else seeing the same thing? Any thoughts on what's going on?
> Or should I just be ignoring this and getting on with the weekend?
>

This appears to be a TCP amplification attack.  Similar to UDP
amplification (DNS, NTP, etc) you can get some amplification by sending a
SYN packet with a spoofed source, and watching your victims receive
multiple SYN-ACK retries.  It's a fairly weak form of attack (as the
amplification factor is small), but if the victim's gear is vulnerable to
high packet rates it may be effective.

The victim (or law enforcement) could identify the true source of the
attack by asking transit providers to check their netflow to see where it
enters their networks.

Damian
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