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Comment by Fuxy | Hacker News Reader

That's a dangerous tool to be releasing this early but hey if you can why not :)

I disagree.

Although some people might take this tool and a list of NTP servers and use it to generate a DDoS against a site or service, it's worth seeing just how simple these attacks are by examining this tool.

They are trivial to perform and the solution, BCP38, needs to be rolled out.

http://blog.cloudflare.com/understanding-and-mitigating-ntp-...

I just don't want it to be too easy for the script kiddies. Anybody who understands the vulnerability could write this pretty easily.

I didn't understand it before. I do now that I can see a working implementation. Words are wind, functional code is powerful :)

At least there isn't a supplied list of ntp servers.

If its so trivial why stress about me releasing it? I figured out how to write the attack from rfcs, wireshark and reports about attacks in early January. Also you can only launch an attack from somewhere that doesn't drop invalid udp packets (windows machines post XPSP2 and many consumer level ISPs) so it has skid protection naturally. To attack with this effectively someone could spawn a AWS instances id imagine.

Imagine my surprise as I was enjoying my cereal this morning and saw this on HN.

Trivial for us doesn't mean trivial for everybody.

More specifically not really trivial for people who might use it irresponsibly because they don't understand the circumstances but hey it's just so easy.

I'm of the philosophy that there needs to be a barrier for entry sometimes.

I'm unsure what you're hoping to accomplish by releasing this?

Also, you (or whoever 'DaRkReD' is, referenced in the script comments), released this on 01-22-2014 to hackforums.com. Personally, I find arming the script kiddies to be inexcusable behavior.

From the hackforums post:

> NTP has a feature called monlist which lists recent clients. Asking for the monlist takes about 90 bytes, the monlist is about 1640 bytes and since NTP is UDP we can spoof the IP origin and those 1640 bytes will go to your target of choice. As a result we have an 18x amplification attack so for every 1 byte you get sent you get 18 bytes sent to the target your home internet can now DOS 18x faster!

AWS, along with other cloud providers such as Rackspace or Digital Ocean have specific detection techniques for DDoS from their servers, in order to maintain legal and reasonable use of their resources.

Also, that's not very responsible to release this script on HackForums, the home of every script kiddie around Internet.

This method of ddosing has been in quite widespread use for several months by now, though.

I rather heard about DNS amplification attacks than NTP amplification recently.

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