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Comment by alickz | Hacker News Reader

>There is a lot of money to be made from paid cosmetics, ranks, moderator (demi-tyrant) status, etc on custom servers.

Anyone have any idea how much a 15 Tbps DDoS attack would cost?

Thousands of dollars? Tens of thousands?

Ballpark math says you could sustain it for half an hour on Hetzner for $5k-$6k (only from 1500 IPs though), at least if your account didn't get banned first and you're halfway decent at network programming. I have no idea what a proper botnet like this costs though or how large the profit margins are.

Isn't the idea behind botnets that no one is paying for the bandwidth, besides the unsuspecting random people who have fallen victim to malware?

I'd imagine the pricing is quite disconnected from the price of "legitimate" bandwidth. But I don't know in what direction.

Yeah I assume there's the initial startup cost of successfully managing to infect a large network of devices, and then the cost for any given use is likely "what customers will pay for it". If they are selecting out big money targets and focusing on gaming, I'm guessing the price isn't that high, but they also presumably know interesting a state actor in taking them down either by changing targets or bringing in enough money is bad for business.

The idea is, the botnets are in control of someone else. Who "owns" them. And some of those will rent "their property" for money, like they would legitimately own them.

Ok, but that doesn’t change the fact that the price of renting them is completely disconnected from the price of bandwidth.

Depends. The more the owners use their bots, or let others use their botnets, the more attention there is to them and the less useful the botnet is (either blacklisted IPs or owners noticing).

And a little bit of malicious bandwidth is easy to hide, a lot not. So there is a price to bandwith to the criminal owner.

Sure, but there’s still no link between what the botnet operator charges and what ISPs charge for bandwidth, that’s the point I’m trying to make.

Because the botnet operator is not paying for the bandwidth, directly or indirectly.

it's not exactly, it depends on the provider, some services seem to display a cap in bandwidth usage.

back in '98 i got a 100mb per download limit for $100 on my cable connection. i recall getting DoS'd by someone cause i was a lpb barstard in quake tf. They were kind though, only DoS'd me 90mb as a warning.... Years later, TF2 is getting DoS'd into oblivion, an extorhted by DDoS for hire. Some things change, some things stay the same.

I'm old enough to remember this site called kuro5hin, and how it folded a bit after it got DoS'd to death around 2000

for those not old enough to remember, that's pronounced "corrosion"

I'm wagering something cheap for individual with a lot of bitcoin or crypto laying around

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