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Comment by rebootthesystem | Hacker News Reader

My message to the attackers (in case they happen to read HN):

Fuck you. I will continue to be a Linode customer. Not sure what your goals might be but you will not succeed.

Frankly, and I am going to be politically incorrect here, these are the kinds of cases where I wish there was a "special forces" kind of task force to hunt down these pieces of shit and put them out of their misery.

This amounts to financial terrorism of the worst kind. It affects small and large companies and creates untold losses across the board. It is entirely unproductive. The world would be a better place if the pieces of shit who engage in this sort of financial terrorism simply didn't exist.

Happy New Year.

Linode folks: I'm renting another server next week. Don't need it. Just want to support your effort and, in a tiny way, help mitigate losses. I might just give it to the kids in the robotic team I mentor so they can play around in a real server environment.

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> Frankly, and I am going to be politically incorrect here, these are the kinds of cases where I wish there was a "special forces" kind of task force to hunt down these pieces of shit and put them out of their misery.

Oh, it's certainly in the capability of the FBI and the NSA to hunt them down. Even child fuckers inside the Darkweb got busted.

The problem is priority: unless either child porn or a huge US company is involved, the three-letter-agencies don't give a shit about this kind of crime.

Which is a shame, because some action would probably dissuade future attempts.

This is NOT the fault of the attackers. The continued efficacy of DDoS attacks is squarely the fault of ISPs who absolutely refuse to police compromised customers or filter egress.

This is a problem that has a solution, but the people in the best position to handle it have shown no interest in doing so for a decade.

Um, yes it is the fault of the attackers. Attackers aren't animals or clouds. They are agents that have free will and are choosing to try and destroy Linode, probably as part of some sort of ransom attempt.

ISPs can't be expected to solve this problem: the ones that have tried discover that it takes huge efforts to get a hacked customer cleaned up, and then they frequently just get re-infected. ISPs exist in a highly price-sensitive and competitive environment: providing dedicated, personalised security services to customers who don't even care or can't be blamed (e.g. hacked router) is incompatible with charging a competitive price.

I don't know what the solution is. Just saying "no" next time someone wants to use crap programming languages and frameworks that systematically lead to exploits would be a good start. No more using C in embedded devices that can't be remotely upgraded.

If you trust people to do the right thing, you're going to get burnt.

We need to evolve the internet past these types of attacks and build systems to protect everyone from this kind of terrorism, rather than just get angry at people who abuse well known about loopholes.

Your anger, while justified, is not helpful.

You are absolutely correct on all points. Yet people need to get angry in order to be motivated enough to cause change. Happy people don't push for change, not on these kinds of issues. There has to be a lot of pain felt and verbalized for anyone to take it seriously.

Example: US government and all necessarily parties start to shut down --as in kill off-- all packets coming in from China every time there's a large DDoS attack. If it stops, we know the source. And we treat them to a full day of packet blocking to see if the Chinese government might become inspired enough to do something about it. Next time, it's two days. Or maybe a week.

This is the kind of thing where pain has to be felt at a high enough level for those who can do something about it to intercede and put an end to it.

And, yes, in the end, it's a technological solution. I won't claim to be informed enough to fully understand what has to be changed in terms of protocols, hardware or topology in order to make DDoS a thing of the past. I simply haven't spent any time studying the problem. I'm sure there are lots of people very well versed in the subject who can pitch in.

At some level though, I think this has to be criminalized and prosecuted with great consequences for the perpetrators in order to put an end to it. I say this because it is likely that whatever new technology is instituted there will be holes bad actors can exploit.

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