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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."
"Hold my beer." -- Internet
1. They just threw down the 'digital gauntlet' at the feet of every hacker/hacker collective/black hat/white hat/whoever; they've more or less declared Open Season on themselves.
1A. They might know damned well they're doing this -- and want their own systems and methods tested in live-fire scenarios.
2. On the surface (allowing for some assumptions, for the sake of argument) this sounds great; but the 'hey, wait a minute..' moment soon comes, and you realize that they're setting themselves up as the Gatekeepers for the Internet; the digital Heimdall standing guard at the Rainbow Bridge to the Internet. That's a lot of power for one company to have, and with that power comes a lot of responsibility -- and potential for abuse.
3. DDoS attacks are just one form of digital treachery that is committed on the Internet; what about everything else?
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.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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.