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Comment by febeling | Hacker News Reader

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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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.

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.

Ransom, taking out competitors (e.g. gambling sites), censorship.

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

> it comes with some risk of being criminally prosecuted

Has there been actual cases of prosecution?

One recent example would be Zeekill, who ran a lot of DDoS attacks:

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

Most of lulzsec, for example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LulzSec

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-operator-illegal-boote...

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/criminal-charges-filed-los-an...

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/individual-pleads-guilty-part...

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.

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.

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

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".

Are you suggesting that CloudFlare is behind the same ddos attack that they're selling protection against? Because that's an absurd accusation.

Why is it absurd? Any such provider has something to gain by scaring us into believing we need their protection.

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.

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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