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Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

That's the particularly bad news, this attack does NOT require a really huge botnet.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/zero-day-rapid-reset-http2-recor...

"Furthermore, one crucial thing to note about the record-breaking attack is that it involved a modestly-sized botnet, consisting of roughly 20,000 machines"

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20000 being modest really says a lot about the state of security on the Internet.

Or does it say more about the sheer number of devices connected to the internet?

Well, 20000 to hit 201 million requests per second and give Cloudflare problems. You wouldn't need that to make problems for many sites.

Distribute just one warez game with your malware embedded and you'll have well over 20,000 hosts under your control.

Is there any major popular account that distributes cracked games that has been found to do such thing? I have seen some popular accounts that create their own installers ("repacks") and the installation takes a suspiciously long time and a huge amount of RAM while is installing.

*the size of

There are 5 billion people on the internet. This is 0.0004%. Even 2 million is only 0.04%.

(this assumes that 1 person = 1 device; some people share devices, most people have more than one, e.g. I have a laptop and a router, many people also have a phone, a work laptop, and whatnot – the average is probably >1, maybe even >2)

> this assumes that 1 person = 1 device; some people share devices, most people have more than one, e.g. I have a laptop and a router, many people also have a phone, a work laptop, and whatnot – the average is probably >1, maybe even >2

And lots of devices are not even that, Internet of Shit garbage is well known for being botnet-central, servers running insecure services are good fodder (it's very common for vulnerabilities to be used not to exploit the machine itself, but to install C&C and leverage the machine into other attacks), ...

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