Death Knell For DDoS Extortion?

Ron writes "Symantec security researcher Yazan Gable has put forward an explanation as to why the number of denial of service attacks has been declining (coincident with the rise of spam). His theory is that DoS attacks are no longer profitable to attackers. While spam and phishing attacks directly generate profit, he argues that extortion techniques often used with DoS attacks are far more risky and often make an attacker no profit at all. Gable writes: 'So what happens if the target of the attack refuses to pay? The DoS extortionist is obligated to carry out a prolonged DoS attack against them to follow through on their threats. For a DoS extortionist, this is the worst scenario because they have to risk their bot network for nothing at all. Since the target has refused to pay, it is likely that they will never pay. As a consequence, the attacker has to spend time and resources on a lost cause.'"

Comments

Maybe not even spam so much... there is worse:

[Penguinisto]

Could be that someday, somebody is going to cobble together a P2P-style redundant agent that coulod convert a botnet into a big-assed torrent server.

I mean, what better place (from an objective POV) to park warez and illicit data (e.g. certain types of illegal pr0n), than on some unsuspecting schlep's machinery?

The mobsters then charge admittance by way of proxies (conceptual term, not 'w.x.y.z:8080') and advertise by way of spam?

/P