Re:The business model for botnets
by graystevens on Tuesday May 15, 2018 @06:02PM
(#17078298)
Spot on - they’re often referred to as ‘stressers’ or ‘booters’, and can make a nice chunk of money. There’s always someone looking to knock someone off of Xbox Live or PSN, or even chance it and try to take down a popular website. Depending on the technique used and the size of the botnet, you can cause some sysadmins or SOCs a headache.
I’m sure anyone else in the ISP industry will tell you that anytime kids are off school (summer holidays or half term here in the UK) the DDoS alerts go up a notch or two.
A bit more than two notches I'd say. The correlation between those is pretty enormous.
It's funny how a small industry is built around this. I remember a few years ago you could pay a monthly fee and they would have tiers and live support.
It wasn't very pricy for small attacks, sometimes even free for anything under 300 seconds.
You rent out the capacity. Few hours of N Gbps flooding, courtesy of 20-30 thousand compromised home systems and IoT shitware units: tens to maybe low hundreds of dollars.
Now assume that's only a couple of percent of the total capacity under the botnet's control. Also, there are 24 hours in a day - once the current blaster's rental time expires, you have another one lined up already.
I recall seeing numbers in some fairly old Krebs article, but can't find it right now.