Webmail Services Struggling Against DDoS Attacks (fastmail.com)

An anonymous reader writes: A few days ago, privacy-oriented webmail service ProtonMail was hit by a massive DDoS attack, which was accompanied by extortion. It turns out they're not the only ones. FastMail has warned that similar attacks could lead to service disruptions this week. They have refused extortion demands, and have been hit with a couple brief attacks already. This follows attacks over the last week on Runbox, Zoho, and Hushmail. Each service has been working with data centers and network providers to mitigate the attacks as well as possible, but they're still struggling with intermittent service disruptions.

Comments

Re:botnets cost money

[alex67500]

Denying traffic takes computing time too, if the attacks are as massive as the TFS suggests, any device used to filter the incoming requests would soon be overwhelmed and the service would be down anyway...

Re:Maybe botnet members should be held responsible

[myowntrueself]

You really don't understand this shit, do you?

The goddam botnets are smart enough to change IP addresses at random, and often.

It's Whack-a-Mole.

Theres even another level of indirection; in reflection attacks you, the recipient of the attack, gets to see the IP addresses of the machines used as reflectors. You don't get to see the IP addresses of the machines used to trigger those reflections. Only the people hosting the reflector get to see the these.