BSD Software Development NTT DATA This document outlines a method to mitigate Denial of Service (DoS) attacks by using a well-known BGP community named "DOWNGRADE" as signal to neighboring networks to treat traffic destined towards "DOWNGRADE" tagged IP prefixes with low precedence. The "downgrade" strategy offers an appealing alternative to Remote Triggered Blackhole (RTBH) filtering, because RTBH filtering completes the DoS attack and hampers the defender's ability to monitor whether the attack is still ongoing.