Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) has developed multiple variants, one of which is Distributed Reflective Denial of Service (DRDoS). With the increasing number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, the threat of DRDoS attack is growing, and the damage of a DRDoS attack is more destructive than other types. The existing DDoS detection methods cannot be generalized in DRDoS early detection, which leads to heavy load or degradation of service when deployed at the final point. In this paper, we propose a DRDoS detection and defense method based on deep forest model (DDDF), and then we integrate differentiated service into defense model to filter out DRDoS attack flow. Firstly, from the statistics perspective on different stages of DRDoS attack flow in the big data environment, we extract a host-based DRDoS threat index (HDTI) from the network flows. Secondly, using the HDTI feature we build a DRDoS detection and defense model based on the deep forest, which consists of 1 extreme gradient boost (XGBoost) forest estimator, 2 random forest estimators, and 2 extra random forest estimators in each layer. Lastly, the differentiated service procedure applies the detection result from DDDF to drop the traffic identified in different stages and different detection points. Theoretical analysis and experiments show that the method we proposed can effectively identify DRDoS attack with higher detection rate and a lower false alarm rate, the defense model also shows distinguishing ability to effectively eliminate the DRDoS attack flows, and dramatically mitigate the damage of a DRDoS attack.Symmetry 2019, 11, 78 2 of 22 access requests, and the internal server or devices reflecting more packets, the DRDoS attack brings the danger of congestion effectively, and the high accessibility of conducting such attacks is achieved due to the easy-use tools and relatively low cost.In 26 September 2016, and 21 October 2016, the network in the United States was also attacked by DRDoS, the attackers unitized tens of millions of webcams and digital video recorders (DVR), sending packets to the Internet service provider (ISP), causing over 1200 websites, including Twitter, Amazon, Reddit, and Netflix to be inaccessible for millions of Internet users. Moreover, the DRDoS attacks witnessed this year have the trend to be more dedicated and sophisticated with higher diversities, as a consequence, a swift, smart and solid cyber-attack detection mechanism is needed for security control for the increasingly vulnerable network.The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Related work is discussed in Section 2. In Section 3, we analyze the feature of general type DRDoS attack as the base theorem for the method we proposed in Section 4, where we will introduce the algorithm of the DRDoS detection method and characterized each part of it. We will then introduce the deep forest model for classification and apply differentiated service in the defense method. And we define differentiated service as a procedure that implements a simple and scalable mechani...