Groups War Over Resources For DDoS Attacks

An anonymous reader quotes CSO: As more groups get into the denial-of-service attack business they're starting to get in each other's way, according to a report released Thursday... There are only so many devices around that have the kind of vulnerabilities that make them potential targets for a botnet. That translates into a smaller average attack size, said Martin McKeay, senior security advocate at Cambridge, Mass.-based Akamai Technologies Inc. There are only so many devices around that have the kind of vulnerabilities that make them potential targets for a botnet. "And other people can come in and take over the device, and take those resources to feed their own botnet," he said. "I'm seeing that over and over."
The article reports a median size for DDoS attacks of 4 gigabits per second at the start of 2015 -- which droped in the first quarter of 2017 down to 500 megabits per second.

Go Brickerbot!

[Dutch Gun]

I'm rooting for BrickerBot. Shut those vulnerable devices down permanently, and there's less for the rest of us to worry about.

Needs more stats

[jon3k]

Lower median could also mean that it's so easy that lots of unskilled botnet creators have entered the arena. You'll notice at the same time the largest DDoS [thehackernews.com] attacks continue to grow year over year.

Re:

[mhkohne]

Lower median could also mean that it's so easy that lots of unskilled botnet creators have entered the arena. You'll notice at the same time the largest DDoS [thehackernews.com] attacks continue to grow year over year.

I think that's exactly what it means, but this means that anyone who really is smart is going to have to go after other classes of device when trying to perform a DOS - because all the kiddies are fighting over the stuff that they used to use. They may still be able to do damage, but they'll have to work for it again, instead of just being able to re-use the stuff they had before.

Re:

[Zocalo]

Or the writers of the rootkits could try to secure the device they have just owned, something that has already been done by several rootkits and exploits in the past. It's actually very rare to see a genuine 0-day exploit being used to generate a botnet, they far more often tend to rely on exploits that have been released for a while and for which patches are often already available, as we just saw with WannaCry. There's basically a race between the vendors of the rootkits who will need to add a new explo

Re:

[Zocalo]

If the admins are that on the ball with their security then you'd kind of expect them to detect and deal with the infection anyway, assuming that they were even vulnerable in the first place, so at best the rootkit is going to buy its operator a little bit of time by doing the bare minimum necessary to setup the bot, but probably not all that much. The flipside would be that the almost certainly far more numerous number of potential targets that don't have a competent admin (including most home PCs) or are

Re:

[jon3k]

I think it's just that we have an entirely new class of targets. We had botnets before Marai and IoT botnets, those didn't go away. We've added more devices to the internet we didn't make any significant improvements to the security of existing devices.

Repeat yourself, you do

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

"As more groups get into the denial-of-service attack business they're starting to get in each other's way, according to a report released Thursday... There are only so many devices around that have the kind of vulnerabilities that make them potential targets for a botnet. That translates into a smaller average attack size, said Martin McKeay, senior security advocate at Cambridge, Mass.-based Akamai Technologies Inc. There are only so many devices around that have the kind of vulnerabilities that make them

From the redundant redundancies dept.

[BarbaraHudson]

There are only so many devices around that have the kind of vulnerabilities that make them potential targets for a botnet. That translates into a smaller average attack size, said Martin McKeay, senior security advocate at Cambridge, Mass.-based Akamai Technologies Inc. There are only so many devices around that have the kind of vulnerabilities that make them potential targets for a botnet.

First they came and duped stories. I didn't say anything because sometimes I missed the original story.

Then they came and duped posts. I didn't say anything because they were easy to ignore.

Next they came and duped sentences in stories to pad them out. I said something ...

TThheeyy rreettaalliiaatteed bbyy bboott--dduuppinngg mmyy kkeeyybbooaarrdd,, tthhee bbaassttaarrddss.