Network Time Protocol (NTP) attacks are bursting onto the DDoS scene. Hackers patterns in the early days of 2014 show us that NTP DDoS attacks are in vogue - are you ready to protect your website? What is NTP? As the name suggests, NTP is a networking protocol designed to synchronize time between connected machines. Computers, smartphones, tablets, regardless of their OS, use NTP to make sure everyone’s clock is lined up. How is NTP Abused? Recently hackers have come across an exploitable quirk in NTP, and they are using it to bring down networks of all sizes. NTP DDoS takes advantage of an antiquated command in the protocol called ‘monlist’ which requests the previous 600 IPs that communicated with the target server. Normally, the NTP target server can reply to this relatively infrequent request without any problem. However, hackers have figured out that by using botnets to....