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Comment by dragontamer | Hacker News Reader

I've got a theory that DDOS services need to "demonstrate" their abilities to the black market, to prove that they're legitimate. Blender is an ideal target: high profile, with enough technical expertise to post and publish the details of the DDOS.

Its not that anyone "wanted" to hurt Blender per se. Its that the DDOS service / black hat group wants to publicly demonstrate themselves and advertise their services.

At least, that's my running theory why otherwise "innocent" projects (like Blender) get attacked like this. Anyone have any other theories why Blender could be targeted?

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Seems like a reasonable theory to me.

I haven't heard that Blender has made any real enemies. Neither is likely they'd be able to pay a lot of ransom (they're pretty well funded for a FOSS project, but not in the range that would make them the most attractive ransom target).

My then-company's site was once threatened for the princely sum of one Bitcoin, back when they were $5,000. Blender has that much to pay in ransom, if they capitulated.

Not a theory, you see this all the time, people used to packet pastebin.com a lot for some reason

One hole in that theory is that Blender didn’t explicitly mention what DDoS-mitigation service they’re using, so no particular service is getting any advertising/exposure benefit from the attack.

I think the parent means people offering DDoS-as-a-service, not DDoS mitigation services.

Blender did buy a DDoS mitigation services as a result.

It's enough to demonstrate necessity.

I'm not saying that DDOS mitigation companies did this.

It is sufficient for a black market DDOS-as-a-service company to do this for marketing.

Aha!

Sort of like Vader showing off the Death Star on Alderaan.

I’m so white-hat that I didn’t consider that interpretation.

> Sort of like Vader showing off the Death Star on Alderaan.

Grand Moff Tarkin showing off the Death Star to Vader (and everyone else).

But yes, I get your point, even if you misremembered the movie slightly :-). Episode 4 was very intriguing because Grand Moff Tarkin (and the Emperor) are the only two people in Episode4/5/6 that Vader listens to.

I know that there's plenty of Disney spinoffs at this point, but more spinoffs that analyze Grand Moff Tarkin would be a good thing.

Perhaps the residents of Flatland are at it again.

I was exactly thinking “why would anyone want to hurt Blender?” as I read the article. Your theory makes a lot of sense.

DDoS is also a good distraction from actual attacks tho

or a racket for cloud providers to drum up some demand

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