Amplification attacks work by overwhelming a target with network traffic by leveraging one or more third-party devices. For most amplification attacks, two conditions are true:

• The protocol used to perform the attack does not verify the requesting source. The response from the network function used should be significantly larger than the request used to solicit it.
• The effectiveness of a DNS amplification attack is directly correlated to the size of the DNS query response. Additionally, the potency of the attack can be increased by employing the use of multiple DNS servers.