The Rising Tide: DDoS from Defective Designs and Defaults

We consider the phenomenon of distributed denial of service attacks that occur through design defects (and poorly chosen defaults) in legitimately operated, entirely secure systems. Particular reference is made to a recently discovered “attack” on stratum 1 Network Time Protocol servers by routers manufactured by D-Link for the consumer market, the latest example of incidents that stretch back for decades. Consideration is given to how these attacks might have been avoided, and why such failures continue to occur.