News Summary

• When I started looking at the problem, we were really thinking in terms of the top booter or stresser services, which is where a lot of the market and a lot of the customer base was.
• But we think it’s a problem that people only pay attention to a little bit of the time, and we think we’re having a lot of success by focusing on it all the time.How effective has been the deterrence?
• DDoS attacks had existed for years before 2016, but the fact that this one incident took down so many major services drew the attention of people who didn’t know much about cybersecurity.Since then, no DDoS attack has ever been so newsworthy, but the problem hasn’t gotten away.
• These are relatively cheap services that allow people with low or no hacking skills to carry out DDoS attacks.On the same day, the feds also announced that they had arrested seven people who allegedly ran those services.
• How can we test these services without causing too much harm?So it’s really like a team sport?Very much, yes.And what message would you send to victims of DDoS?Let us know.
• For operators, as we laid out in the presentation, what we’re trying to establish is does their service work because we want to focus our time on people who are actually really facilitating DDoS generally?