Plex Media Servers Are Being Abused For DDoS Attacks

DDoS-for-hire services have found a way to abuse Plex Media servers to bounce junk traffic and amplify distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, security firm Netscout said in an alert this week. From a report: The company's alert warns owners of devices that ship with Plex Media Server, a web application for Windows, Mac, and Linux that's usually used for video or audio streaming and multimedia asset management. The app can be installed on regular web servers or usually ships with network-attached storage (NAS) systems, digital media players, or other types of multimedia-streaming IoT devices. Netscout says that when a server/device running a Plex Media Server app is booted and connected to a network, it will start a local scan for other compatible devices via the Simple Service Discovery Protocol (SSDP). The problem comes when a Plex Media Server discovers a local router that has SSDP support enabled. When this happens, the Plex Media Server will add a NAT forwarding rule to the router, exposing its Plex Media SSDP (PMSSDP) service directly on the internet on UDP port 32414. Since the SSDP protocol has been known for years to be a perfect vector to amplify the size of a DDoS attack, this makes Plex Media servers a juicy and untapped source of DDoS bots for DDoS-for-hire operations.

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