Combined Volumetric Attack

A Combined Volumetric Attack utilizing SYN Flood, UDP Flood, and ICMP Flood vectors is a high-impact DDoS strategy that overwhelms a target’s network and infrastructure by exploiting different protocol layers simultaneously. This multi-pronged approach is designed to exhaust both bandwidth capacity and network stack resources, creating a sustained denial of service that is significantly harder to mitigate than single-vector attacks.


The attack typically involves:

  • SYN Floods targeting the TCP handshake process, depleting server connection tables and exhausting stateful resources.

  • UDP Floods bombarding random or specific ports with massive amounts of connectionless datagrams, consuming bandwidth and CPU cycles.

  • ICMP Floods (such as ping floods or smurf attacks) that generate excessive echo request packets to saturate network bandwidth and processing queues.


By combining these vectors, attackers increase the entropy and complexity of traffic patterns, making it difficult for traditional mitigation tools to distinguish malicious flows from legitimate activity in real-time.

Attack Mechanics


SYN Flood

  • Exploits the TCP 3-way handshake.

  • Sends a high volume of TCP SYN packets with spoofed IP addresses.

  • Target system holds half-open connections, leading to state exhaustion.

UDP Flood

  • Sends UDP packets to random or targeted ports.

  • Triggers ICMP “Destination Unreachable” replies or forces application-level processing.

  • Amplifies CPU load and network throughput consumption.

ICMP Flood

  • Sends ICMP echo requests (or variations like Smurf or Ping of Death).

  • Overwhelms the victim’s network pipeline and processing capacity.

  • Often used to clog ingress bandwidth and confuse mitigation systems.

Impact

  • Bandwidth Saturation: Flooding from all three vectors simultaneously congests inbound links.

  • Service Disruption: Legitimate user traffic is delayed, degraded, or dropped entirely.

  • Increased Detection Difficulty: The attack’s hybrid nature masks traffic anomalies, challenging signature-based defenses.

  • Collateral Damage: Downstream services and routers may suffer from overload and crash.

Mitigation Strategy

A layered mitigation approach is essential for defending against combined volumetric attacks:

  1. Traffic Rate Limiting & Filtering

    • Employ rate controls on SYN, UDP, and ICMP packets.

    • Use Access Control Lists (ACLs) and stateful firewalls with SYN proxying.

  2. Anomaly-Based Detection

    • Deploy behavioral analytics and anomaly detection systems to identify unusual traffic spikes and patterns.

  3. Scrubbing Centers & Cloud-Based Mitigation

    • Redirect malicious traffic to cloud scrubbing services that can clean multi-vector floods.

    • Ensure your upstream ISP has DDoS protection capacity.

  4. Geo-IP and Protocol Filtering

    • Apply geographic or protocol-level filters during the attack to minimize attack surface.

  5. Rate-Adaptable Filters

    • Implement dynamic filtering systems that can adapt thresholds in real-time based on traffic load.


by Sergei Penchuk, CISSP

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