Editing Denial-of-service attack (section)

===Backscatter===
{{See also|Backscatter (email)|Internet background noise}}

In computer network security, backscatter is a side-effect of a spoofed denial-of-service attack. In this kind of attack, the attacker spoofs the source address in [[IP packet (disambiguation)|IP packets]] sent to the victim. In general, the victim machine cannot distinguish between the spoofed packets and legitimate packets, so the victim responds to the spoofed packets as it normally would. These response packets are known as backscatter.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.caida.org/publications/animations/ |work=Animations |title=Backscatter Analysis (2001) |type=video |publisher=[[Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis]] |access-date=December 11, 2013}}</ref>

If the attacker is spoofing source addresses randomly, the backscatter response packets from the victim will be sent back to random destinations. This effect can be used by [[network telescope]]s as indirect evidence of such attacks. The term ''backscatter analysis'' refers to observing backscatter packets arriving at a statistically significant portion of the IP address space to determine the characteristics of DoS attacks and victims.