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A comment on Statement regarding the ongoing Sourcehut outage.

Re:Statement regarding the ongoing Sourcehut outage by febeling on Friday January 12, 2024 @05:20AM (#38966287)
What is the motivation of ddos attacks, in general? I assume it comes with some risk of being criminally prosecuted, so there must be some upside. Is it shakedown attempts, or competitor's sabotage? Neither seems too plausible in this case.
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Re:Statement regarding the ongoing Sourcehut outage by mobiuscog on Friday January 12, 2024 @05:47AM (#38966484)
script-kiddies, state actors, misconfigured botnets...

Motivation can often be like why everything is re-written: "Because we can" or just "Because it's there".

I'm not in the circle of these things, but history/news suggests that many are performed by those under the age of adult prosecution, or from countries that don't care, so there is minimal risk, and even when there is those involved are not the sort to believe they will get caught.

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Re:Statement regarding the ongoing Sourcehut outage by raverbashing on Friday January 12, 2024 @05:25AM (#38966320)
> it comes with some risk of being criminally prosecuted

Has there been actual cases of prosecution?

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Re:Statement regarding the ongoing Sourcehut outage by dewey on Friday January 12, 2024 @06:27AM (#38966795)
One recent example would be Zeekill, who ran a lot of DDoS attacks:

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2023/02/finlands-most-wanted-hac...

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Re:Statement regarding the ongoing Sourcehut outage by Propa_ganda on Friday January 12, 2024 @06:27AM (#38966800)
Most of lulzsec, for example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LulzSec
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Re:Statement regarding the ongoing Sourcehut outage by o11c on Friday January 12, 2024 @11:53AM (#38970485)
Specifically, have there been cases of prosecution for those who hire the services? All of the links given so far appear to be for operators.
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Re:Statement regarding the ongoing Sourcehut outage by nurettin on Friday January 12, 2024 @06:11AM (#38966670)
Most obvious is: someone doesn't like part of a code hosted on the website, and it is easy to take down. There was probably a cursory warning that we don't know about.
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Re:Statement regarding the ongoing Sourcehut outage by Am4TIfIsER0ppos on Friday January 12, 2024 @06:30AM (#38966832)
Motivation? The "quoted a number we cannot reasonably achieve within our financial means" is all the motivation "someone" needs. So yeah "shakedown" or "protection racket".
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Re:Statement regarding the ongoing Sourcehut outage by arrowsmith on Friday January 12, 2024 @08:18AM (#38967579)
Are you suggesting that CloudFlare is behind the same ddos attack that they're selling protection against? Because that's an absurd accusation.
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Re:Statement regarding the ongoing Sourcehut outage by fmajid on Friday January 12, 2024 @08:58AM (#38967971)
Not the parent, but obviously if the cost of CloudFlare protection is $XXX million, a protection racket can say: pay us 10% of $XXX M to make this problem go away. It's routinely deployed against highly profitable online businesses like gambling, but I doubt even at a 90% discount (and assuming SourceHut were willing to pay off criminals, which I doubt), they are not likely to be a profitable target for extortion and some other motive must be at play.
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Re:Statement regarding the ongoing Sourcehut outage by mwcampbell on Friday January 12, 2024 @08:53AM (#38967916)
Why is it absurd? Any such provider has something to gain by scaring us into believing we need their protection.
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Re:Statement regarding the ongoing Sourcehut outage by n1c00o on Friday January 12, 2024 @09:12AM (#38968124)
No, its more for the "fun" of making firms lose money, kinda LulzSec [0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LulzSec

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Re:Statement regarding the ongoing Sourcehut outage by fmajid on Friday January 12, 2024 @08:52AM (#38967904)
Ransom, taking out competitors (e.g. gambling sites), censorship.

The Chinese government regularly targets GitHub because it hosts VPN software.

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Re:Statement regarding the ongoing Sourcehut outage by dns_snek on Friday January 12, 2024 @10:31AM (#38969206)
Often it's as simple as unhinged individuals renting an attack because they feel wronged by their victim. That's a big reason why Discord became so popular (Skype and Teamspeak revealed your IP address) and why the vast majority of online games stopped using direct P2P networking.
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Re:Statement regarding the ongoing Sourcehut outage by mardifoufs on Friday January 12, 2024 @03:17PM (#38973389)
For dark net markets, it was commonly used to extract a ransom or to make other websites aware of their DDoS capabilities so that others pay the ransom too. But for a clear web website it's probably not a monetary incentive
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