On 30 Oct 2016, at 7:32, Ronald F. Guilmette wrote:
you don't need to be either an omnious "state actor" or even SPECTER to assemble a truly massive packet weapon.
I agree: <https://www.arbornetworks.com/blog/asert/how-to-become-an-internet-supervillain-in-three-easy-steps/> ;>
Two kids with a modest amount of knowledge and a lot of time on their hands can do it from their mom's basement.
And indeed have done so, many times. The *entire purpose* of Mirai is DDoS-for-hire - it's a foundation for so-called 'booter/stresser' services. So, the various articles about how these botnets 'might' be for sale are uninformed - they're *for rent*, that's their raison d'être. And renting them is cheap. The economic and resource asymmetries highly favor the attackers. All the speculation about how 'state actors' are somehow 'learning how to take down the Internet' is equally uninformed. State actors already know how to do this, they don't need to 'learn' or 'test' anything. DDoS attacks are the Great Equalizer; when it comes to DDoS, nation-states are just another player. ----------------------------------- Roland Dobbins <rdobbins@arbor.net>