Malicious actors have been abusing Plex Media Server to amplify distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, according to application and network performance management company Netscout.
A popular personal media library and streaming solution, Plex Media Server can be used on Windows, macOS, and Linux systems, to stream content, including that from network-attached storage (NAS) devices, RAID storage, and the like.
Plex typically searches the local network for compatible media devices and streaming clients. The issue, Netscout researchers explain, appears when, at launch, the application locates UPnP gateways on broadband Internet access routers with the Simple Service Discovery Protocol (SSDP) enabled.
Once it has identified an UPnP gateway, Plex attempts to set dynamic NAT forwarding rules on the router, which results in a Plex UPnP-enabled service registration responder becoming exposed to the Internet, thus enabling DDoS reflection and amplification.
To differentiate it from the typical SSDP reflection/amplification method, the new abuse technique has been called Plex Media SSDP (PMSSDP). More than 27,000 abusable PMSSDP reflectors/amplifiers were identified.
The amplified PMSSDP DDoS attack traffic that has been observed so far consists of SSDP HTTP/U responses on UDP port 32414. With the amplified response packet in the 52–281 bytes range, the average amplification factor is of approximately 4.68:1, the researchers explain.
“Observed single-vector PMSSDP reflection/amplification DDoS attacks to date range in size from ~2 Gbps – ~3 Gbps; multi-vector (2–10 vectors) and omni-vector (11 or more vectors) attacks incorporating PMSSDP range from the low tens of Gbps up to 218 Gbps,” Netscout notes.
The researchers also warn that DDoS-for-hire services have added PMSSDP to their arsenal and say that both single- and multi-vector reflection/amplification attacks that abuse PMSSDP have increased in incidence since November o ..
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