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Some quotes from the article: “These things are essentially like nuclear bombs,” said Matthew Prince, chief executive of Cloudflare. “It’s so easy to cause so
by 16s 14y ago
Some quotes from the article:
“These things are essentially like nuclear bombs,” said Matthew Prince, chief executive of Cloudflare. “It’s so easy to cause so much damage.”
"He likened the technique, which uses a long-known flaw in the Internet’s basic plumbing, to using a machine gun to spray an entire crowd when the intent is to kill one person."
The hyperbole here is astounding. DNS amplification attacks and generic DDOS attacks are nothing at all like that. Why do these silly articles continually relate them to war and weapons that kill humans?
Edit: I read once in the monthly cryptogram that a DDOS is more like the Russians sending a million man army to go stand in line at the local DMV. They deny normal customers the service, they do not kill them. Denying access and killing are two very different things.
- jiggy2011 14y agoYou're right, it's a bad analogy but people always struggle with trying to analogise things like this that don't have a parallel in the physical world. If you had the Russian army attempt to blockade shops you would expect a response from the US Army and the shop to be unblockaded in fairly short order. The dangerous thing about DDOS is not that it's a particularly deadly weapon but that it's powerful enough to do a non-zero amount of economic damage with little/no risk for the perpetrator and that there is no effective counter-measure that doesn't involve throwing money away.