A UDP flood is a form of volumetric Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack where the attacker targets and overwhelms random ports on the host with IP packets containing User Datagram Protocol (UDP) packets. In this type of attack, the host looks for applications associated with these datagrams. When none are found, the host issues a “Destination Unreachable” packet back to the sender. The cumulative effect of being bombarded by such a flood is that the system becomes inundated and therefore unresponsive to legitimate traffic. In a UDP flood DDoS attack, the attacker may also choose to spoof the IP address of the packets. This ensures that the return ICMP packets are not able to reach their host, while also keeping the attack completely anonymous.

UDP Flood DDoS Attack