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T1498.002sub-technique of T1498 Network Denial of Service

Reflection Amplification

Windows · IaaS · Linux · macOSnothing on this site yetT1498.002 on attack.mitre.org

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.

MITRE ATT&CK 19.2, retrieved 2026-09-12

If this is happening now

1

Checklists and playbooks to open while the alert is still live.

how MITRE says to see it

Detection Strategy for Reflection Amplification DoS (T1498.002)

  • Outbound spoofed traffic to known amplification protocols (e.g., DNS, NTP, Memcached) combined with abnormal network traffic volume targeting remote reflectors, resulting in disproportionate traffic returned to a victim
  • Spoofed outbound packets sent to amplification services from command-line tools or scripts, combined with abnormal outbound packet volume on known reflector ports
  • Command-line initiated UDP traffic bursts to external reflection amplification ports using built-in scripting or binaries with network anomalies
  • Cloud-hosted VM or container generates spoofed UDP requests to third-party services on known amplifier ports, with high outbound-to-inbound traffic ratios in VPC Flow Logs

what reduces it

  • M1037 Filter Network Traffic. When flood volumes exceed the capacity of the network connection being targeted, it is typically necessary to intercept the incoming traffic upstream to filter out the attack traffic from the legitimate traffic. Such defenses can be provided by the hosting Internet Service Provider (ISP) or by a 3rd party such as a Content Delivery Network (CDN) or providers specializing in DoS mitigations.

the rest of T1498

The description, detection analytics and mitigations are reproduced from MITRE ATT&CK, version 19.2, under its terms of use. The checklists, hunts, labs and everything else linked here are this site’s.