DDoS Attacks Will Now Be 'Something You Only Read About In The History Books', Says Cloudflare CEO (vice.com)

Louise Matsakis, writing for Motherboard: Cloudflare, a major internet security firm, is on a mission to render distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks useless. The company announced Monday that every customer -- including those who only use its free services -- will receive a new feature called Unmetered Mitigation, which protects against every DDoS attack, regardless of its size. Cloudflare believes the move is set to level the internet security playing field: Now every website will be able to fight back against DDoS attacks for free. "The standard practice in the industry for some time has been to charge more if you come under attack," Matthew Prince, the CEO of Cloudflare, told me on a phone call last week. Firms often "fire you as a customer if you're not sort of paying enough and you get a large attack," he explained. "That's kind of gross."

Comments

Re:Nice marketing-lie

[Guspaz]

CloudFlare has several times handled DDoS attacks that were then the largest attacks recorded, including a 400Gbps in 2014 and a 600Gbps in 2016. Sometimes these are simple network traffic requests, sometimes these are masquerading as legitimate traffic. In the latter case, you'll see an interstitial page that appears to validate your browser using some sort of javascript. In either case, they certainly have a proven track record of handling very large attacks.

Re:A few possible problems:

[Guspaz]

CloudFlare was handling roughly 10% of all web traffic a year and a half ago, presumably it's higher now. They're already one of the gatekeepers.

Re:A few possible problems:

[guruevi]

Cloudflare is big, it has hosting in a lot of major ISP's network. What Cloudflare does is when it notices a DDoS attack from a particular segment, it shifts the traffic to the closest originating ISP and then it only impacts the ISP which at that point is going to be motivated to getting the 'bad traffic' off their network whether that is by pressuring smaller ISP's or simply cutting them off.