Attackers abuse legacy routing protocol to amplify distributed denial-of-service attacks

Servers could be haunted by a ghost from the 1980s, as hackers have started abusing an obsolete routing protocol to launch distributed denial-of-service attacks.

DDoS attacks observed in May by the research team at Akamai abused home and small business (SOHO) routers that still support Routing Information Protocol version 1 (RIPv1). This protocol is designed to allow routers on small networks to exchange information about routes.

RIPv1 was first introduced in 1988 and was retired as an Internet standard in 1996 due to multiple deficiencies, including lack of authentication. These were addressed in RIP version 2, which is still in use today.

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