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ATT&CK Technique

Reflection Amplification

T1498.002 · impact

Adversaries may attempt to cause a denial of service (DoS) by reflecting a high-volume of network traffic to a target. This type of Network DoS takes advantage of a third-party server intermediary that hosts and will respond to a given spoofed source IP address. This third-party server is commonly termed a reflector.

An adversary accomplishes a reflection attack by sending packets to reflectors with the spoofed address of the victim. Similar to Direct Network Floods, more than one system may be used to conduct the attack, or a botnet may be used. Likewise, one or more reflectors may be used to focus traffic on the target.

This Network DoS attack may also reduce the availability and functionality of the targeted system(s) and network. Reflection attacks often take advantage of protocols with larger responses than requests in order to amplify their traffic, commonly known as a Reflection Amplification attack. Adversaries may be able to generate an increase in volume of attack traffic that is several orders of magnitude greater than the requests sent to the amplifiers.

The extent of this increase will depending upon many variables, such as the protocol in question, the technique used, and the amplifying servers that actually produce the amplification in attack volume. Two prominent protocols that have enabled Reflection Amplification Floods are DNS and NTP, though the use of several others in the wild have been documented. In particular, the memcache protocol showed itself to be a powerful protocol, with amplification sizes up to 51,200 times the requesting packet.

WindowsIaaSLinuxmacOS
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Actors Using This

6
russia_aligned_false_flag_hacktivismAnonymous Sudan
anonymous_offshoot_multi_ideology_driftGhostSec
ukraine_government_volunteer_offensive_operationsIT Army of Ukraine
russia_aligned_hacktivismKillnet
russia_aligned_hacktivismNoName057(16)
russiaSandworm Team
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Likely Attack Path

Techniques the same actors pair with this one distinctively - those showing up among actors who use this technique noticeably more than across all actors (lift > 1.15), grouped by kill-chain phase. The × is that lift multiplier; the shared-actor count is in the tooltip. A near-universal technique pairs with everything at baseline, so its list is short by design.
reconnaissance earlier
T1591.003 · Identify Business Tempo ×39.67T1597.001 · Threat Intel Vendors ×39.67T1597.002 · Purchase Technical Data ×39.67T1593.002 · Search Engines ×29.75T1597 · Search Closed Sources ×29.75T1591.001 · Determine Physical Locations ×23.80T1591.002 · Business Relationships ×23.80T1594 · Search Victim-Owned Websites ×23.80
resource-development earlier
T1583.005 · Botnet ×23.80
impact same
T1499.003 · Application Exhaustion Flood ×39.67T1499.001 · OS Exhaustion Flood ×39.67T1499.002 · Service Exhaustion Flood ×33.06T1498.001 · Direct Network Flood ×29.75T1498 · Network Denial of Service ×21.64T1499.004 · Application or System Exploitation ×13.22
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Mitigations

1
MITRE ATT&CK mitigations - vendor-agnostic guidance for reducing exposure to this technique.
M1037Filter Network Traffic

Employ network appliances and endpoint software to filter ingress, egress, and lateral network traffic. This includes protocol-based filtering, enforcing firewall rules, and blocking or restricting traffic based on predefined conditions to limit adversary movement and data exfiltration.

Ingress Traffic Filtering
  • Use Case: Configure network firewalls to allow traffic only from authorized IP addresses to public-facing servers.
  • Implementation: Limit SSH (port 22) and RDP (port 3389) traffic to specific IP ranges.
Egress Traffic Filtering
  • Use Case: Use firewalls or endpoint security software to block unauthorized outbound traffic to prevent data exfiltration and command-and-control (C2) communications.
  • Implementation: Block outbound traffic to known malicious IPs or regions where communication is unexpected.
Protocol-Based Filtering
  • Use Case: Restrict the use of specific protocols that are commonly abused by adversaries, such as SMB, RPC, or Telnet, based on business needs.
  • Implementation: Disable SMBv1 on endpoints to prevent exploits like EternalBlue.
Network Segmentation
  • Use Case: Create network segments for critical systems and restrict communication between segments unless explicitly authorized.
  • Implementation: Implement VLANs to isolate IoT devices or guest networks from core business systems.
Application Layer Filtering
  • Use Case: Use proxy servers or Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) to inspect and block malicious HTTP/S traffic.
  • Implementation: Configure a WAF to block SQL injection attempts or other web application exploitation techniques.
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Detection Coverage

0/6 layers
Coverage across standard detection surfaces. Rows marked none have no rule of that type mapped. Some are real blind spots worth closing; others are simply not applicable to this technique (e.g. YARA matches malware files, not network behaviour).
Behavioral / log (Sigma) none
Analytics (MITRE CAR) none
Runtime / container (Falco) none
File / malware (YARA) none
Network (Suricata/Snort) none
Vuln scan (Nuclei) none
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Comply & Defend

NIST 800-53AC-03, AC-04, CA-07, CM-06, CM-07, SC-07, SI-10, SI-15
D3FEND11 defensive techniques
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MITRE ATT&CKAtomic Red Teamcar (MITRE)
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