Existing backdoor attacks in FL suffer from common deficiencies: fixed trigger patterns and reliance on the assistance of model poisoning. State-of-the-art defenses based on analyzing clients’ model updates exhibit a good defense performance on these attacks because of the significant divergence between malicious and benign client model updates. To effectively conceal malicious model updates among benign ones, we propose DPOT, a backdoor attack strategy in FL that dynamically constructs backdoor objectives by optimizing a backdoor trigger, making backdoor data have minimal effect on model updates. We provide theoretical justifications for DPOT’s attacking principle and display experimental results showing that DPOT, via only a data-poisoning attack, effectively undermines state-of-the-art defenses and outperforms existing backdoor attack techniques on various datasets.