As cybersecurity professionals point out, distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks have begun to become more dangerous than they have ever been. Cybercriminals have begun employing a new attack method known as distributed denial of service (DDoS), which has the potential to be hundreds of times stronger than the strongest online attacks of their kind ever recorded.

In a paper published recently, cybersecurity researchers from the cybersecurity and cloud services company Akamai detailed the discovery of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that exploited so-called middleboxes and reached speeds of 11 Gbps and 1.5 million packets per second.

Almost a year ago, cybersecurity researchers from the University of Maryland and the University of Colorado in the United States proposed the concept of this form of assault for the first time.

There are more than 100,000 misconfigured servers in the world, according to Akamai's research, which might be exploited to amplify distributed denial of service attacks.

They are often referred to as middleboxes, and they are typically put up by governments in order to censor undesirable content, restrict pirated content, pornographic content, and gambling websites.

The fact that these servers do not adhere to the transfer control protocol specifications, which require three-way handling before establishing a connection, contributes to the misconfiguration.

Online attackers, according to Akamai, are already attacking sites in the banking, tourism, gambling, media, and web hosting businesses, among other sectors.

By faking the destination IP address and rejecting a relatively little amount of data on a misconfigured server, which is used to resolve the domain name, synchronize the computer clock, or speed up the database cache, the amplification can be accomplished.

When the server answers, it delivers data packets that are hundreds of times larger than the bogus target, easily overcoming it. Research shows that the increase factor might be anywhere from 54 times to an astonishing 51,000 times greater than the original.