> The solution is to finally hold accountable attack origins (ISPs, mostly), so that monitoring their egress becomes something they have an incentive to do.
Be careful what you wish for. The sort of centralized C&C infrastructure and "list of bad actors everybody has to de-peer" that you would need to this effectively would we a wonderful juicy target for governments to go, "hey, add [this site we don't like] to the list, or go to prison".
Aren't there already a dozen or so such lists? I don't see how one more list really increases the risk.
You can make the list public - most of the bad actors are obsolete, compromised equipment for which the owner is unaware of the problem. Once the list is public, it's pretty easy to detect anyone trying to abuse the list as a tool of censorship.
And I do count that in.
Just because a user is the source of an attack unknowingly doesn’t make it right.
What would make it right is for there to be a more generalized remote blackholing system in place.
ie my site runs on an IP, is able to tell my ISP to reject traffic to it from $sources, and my ISP can send that request to the source ISP.
And if it makes my site unavailable to that other ISP because of CGNAT and 0 oversight, tough luck. Guess their support is getting calls so maybe they start monitoring obviously abusive egress spikes per-destination.
Yes, you're 100% correct. Back in the day when the main bot net activity was spam if you were infected and you started sending TB of spam the ISP would first block your outgoing smtp. If they kept getting complaints in a week or two they'd cut you off.
I remember 30 years ago when most people were on dialup, I was fortunate enough to have 128kB SDSL. As a relatively clueless kid I decided to portscan an IP range belonging to a mobile service company. Few days later my dad got a phone call saying their IDS flagged it and "don't do it or we'll cancel your service". For a port scan of few public IPs no less!
ISPs could definitely put a stop to 99% of these botnets, but until they see some ROI, why would they bother?
There’s no practical action being taken besides « use our profucts cause we can tank it for you » here.
The mitigations listed are better than nothing, but the fact that every skid out there can hire a botnet of a few thousands compromised machines (like here) and send you a few millions (say this protocol attack allowed a 100x higer than avg impact) rps is way enough to kill the infra of 99.99% websites. No questions asked.
That’s not a fair point.
We’re not even trying to make the internet safe. There is zero (0) actions being taken to stop this madness. If you run a large website, you still regularly see attacks from routers compromised 3, 4, 5 years ago. Or how a mere few days of poking around smartly is still enough to this day to find enough open DNS resolvers to launch >500Gbps attacks with one or two computers.
Why are these threats allowed to still exist?
The only ones attempting something are governments shutting down booters (DDoS-as-a-service platforms). But that’s treating symptoms, not causes.
We will eventually need to do something, or it will be impossible to run a website that can’t be kicked down for free by the next bored skid.
Just like paying protection fees to the mafia was a status quo, this also is just that. A status quo, not an inevitability.
The solution is to finally hold accountable attack origins (ISPs, mostly), so that monitoring their egress becomes something they have an incentive to do.