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:Hubris

[Zocalo]

Matthew Prince should have a chat with Bill Gates about how well his 2004 prediction at Davos that spam will be a solved problem within two years worked out.

Also from that link:

[Gates] hailed search technology firm Google as a "great company"; its approach reminded him of Microsoft 20 years ago. But he also predicted that Microsoft search technology would soon outpace that of its rival.

I suspect Prince's powers of prognostication are no better than Gates'.

Re:Hubris

[phantomfive]

The only way this works (financially) is if they can publicize well enough, "DDOS against Cloudflare won't work, they have too much bandwidth," and people stop trying.

IF they are successful in holding off a few well-publicized DDOS attempts, then their strategy will probably work.

Re:Hubris

[pushing-robot]

Gmail launched a few months after Gates's prediction, and within a couple years had pretty much solved the unsolicited spam problem by monitoring the flow of mass emails and crowdsourcing spam identification to users. Other email providers and spam filters followed suit. A 'solved problem' doesn't mean the problem doesn't exist anymore, it means that there are now solutions to said problem.

And re: search, you can't really fault him for supporting his own company.