A new type of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is abusing a common HTML5 attribute to overwhelm targeted victims.
Security firm Imperva reported on April 11 that it has discovered a campaign where hackers abused the <a> tag ping HTML5 attribute in a DDoS attack that generated 70 million requests in four hours. The ping attribute is intended to be used by websites as a mechanism to notify a website if a user follows a given link on a page. Typically, a ping is a single action, but Imperva discovered that hackers have found a way to amplify the ping into a more persistent data flow, triggering the DDoS attack.