Ragebooter: ‘Legit’ DDoS Service, or Fed Backdoor?

The "admission of guilt" came after krebs needled the "suspect?" incessantly via his personal facebook chat about the illigitimacy of his business.

Does anybody else think that Poland was just trolling krebs at this point?

Krebs continues... "When I asked Poland to provide more information that I might use to verify his claims that he was working for the FBI, the conversation turned combative,"

I am pretty sure that Poland was already in full on defense mode when he told krebs he worked for the FBI.

EDIT: Jesus christ Krebs... Seriously? "The victims can see the ragebooter.net username of the logged in attacker because that info is, bizzarely, sent within attack traffic."

If that isn't a blatant example that the company isn't trying to hide anything, and that you're being an unlrelenting paranoid security "expert" I don't know what is.

Leave this man and his business alone. Just because he doesn't fit your definition of being moral and just doesn't mean you should write up a witch hunt about him on your blog.

I don't understand how you can run a illegal service and use similiar pseudonyms and @gmail.com or @live.com e-mail addresses. Reminds of these excellent slides for opsec: http://slideshare.net/grugq/opsec-for-hackers

There are similiar services available as tor hidden service where you can pay with bitcoin.

But I really don't understand why would anyone use this? Is this some form of blackmailing for buisnesses that need to be online to generate money?

I have some experience managing servers that were targeted by script kiddies using services like this. Dealing with the attacks is usually pretty simple due to clear ways to identify the traffic (i.e. the bots all have the same useragent). However, if they're powerful enough to fully saturate your connection, you're going to have a tougher time. It's great that sysadmins can mostly get away with just paying for CloudFlare, nowadays.

What actually surprises me more about this article is that he is operating in the United States. However, I'm not sure the value of an "FBI backdoor" in this situation. People "renting a botnet" are not usually important people that I'd think the FBI should be spending their budget on.

I have the feeling it's gotten some unwanted attention. Here's a cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

The web has become a very crazy place. I'm not sure I'm able to tell Neal Stephenson novels and reality apart anymore.