>The Aisuru DDoS botnet operates as a DDoS-for-hire service with restricted clientele; operators have reportedly implemented preventive measures to avoid attacking governmental, law enforcement, military, and other national security properties. Most observed Aisuru attacks to date appear to be related to online gaming.
So why? Like why would someone pay to take a game down? I see this all over reddit with different games but I just don't get the point. What's the benefit of taking down an online game for a couple of hours.
Mad salt. Imagine a fully grown man having a toddler tantrum. "If I can't play/win/get my way, nobody can" type mentality. It's also a method of coercion. Give me mod status or I'll DDOS your server and destroy your community.
The other half comes from sever operators ddosing their competition. There is a lot of money to be made from paid cosmetics, ranks, moderator (demi-tyrant) status, etc on custom servers.
Ballpark math says you could sustain it for half an hour on Hetzner for $5k-$6k (only from 1500 IPs though), at least if your account didn't get banned first and you're halfway decent at network programming. I have no idea what a proper botnet like this costs though or how large the profit margins are.
Yeah I assume there's the initial startup cost of successfully managing to infect a large network of devices, and then the cost for any given use is likely "what customers will pay for it". If they are selecting out big money targets and focusing on gaming, I'm guessing the price isn't that high, but they also presumably know interesting a state actor in taking them down either by changing targets or bringing in enough money is bad for business.
It depends on the game, but for those with some kind of marketplace or transferable currency, I'm guessing market manipulation is one possible reason.
For other games, maybe trying to interrupt some time limited event or tournament. Going all the way down the rabbit hole, if you're not already familiar take a look at how crazy things get in a game like EVE: Online.
Then of course there are the bored trolls and/or people who feel wronged by the game's developers or other players.
Probably it has to do with all the gambling sites associated with gaming not the games itself.
Taking a competitor offline for a few hours is a lot of money in a market business I expect.
there seems to be lot of weird stuff going on with gaming casinos the recent CoffeeZilla episode comes to mind, so wouldn’t be surprised if botnets are used
the ddos market has been somewhat centered around gaming for a while now, mainly to take down game server competition, or as an attempt to sell big players on "ddos protection" services.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned duping. Selling items and currency for real world money is big bucks and IME, server crashes reliably enable duping exploits.
Not saying that's the case in this particular incident though.
The results are very public, it's the same way IRC is often targeted. They're easy targets, thousands of users are affected and the results are immediately noticeable.
> So why? Like why would someone pay to take a game down? I see this all over reddit with different games but I just don't get the point. What's the benefit of taking down an online game for a couple of hours.
Most of the time crime groups are running extortion campaigns, amplification campaigns, etc. For example, if a competitor can benefit from them being down you may be able to sell that. Eventually we will probably see the invention of crowd-funded randsomware, where everyone must submit one verification can of crypto to unlock the hacked game servers.
Misdirection. If I knock _you_ offline, its not going to be that difficult for you to put together a probable suspects list with me on it.
If it's going to cost me about the same in terms of resources to target you and a bunch of other people colocated with you, it's a bit less obvious who launched it and why.
A satisfying theory for a lot of DDoS would be extortion or protection rackets. Pay up or we will DDoS you, or pay up or 'someone else' will DDoS you.
That's enough to explain it. But if you wanted to go more full shadowy conspiracy theory, someone arranged for a protection service that just so happens to work by giving some entity cleartext surveillance over much of the internet. Perhaps as a response to HTTPS everywhere being annoying.
I'm not suggesting that's the situation, but that it's the kind of possibility to keep in mind, intellectually, and it would be consistent with history.
Uh I used to get DDoSed by “booter” services whenever I would login to one of my Skype accounts. The script kiddie scene is that petty. In the private server scene one guy would DDoS competing servers that way everyone would funnel to his own.
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted, this is literally what keeps happening to me. I run a couple private MMO servers, I regularly get hit with DDoS attacks and clowns like this guy DMing me to demand money to stop attacking my servers:
> it suddenly ballooned in size in April 2025 after its operators breached a TotoLink router firmware update server and infected approximately 100,000 devices
This is scary. Everyone lauds open source projects like OpenWRT but... who is watching their servers?
I imagine you can't run an army of security people on donations and a shoestring budget. Does OpenWRT use digital signing to mitigate this?
Why, OpenWRT firmware and packages are both signed, of course. You can manually and independently check the image signature before flashing an update.
The build infrastructure is, of course, a juicy target: infect the artifact after building but before signing, and pwn millions of boxes before this is detected.
This exchange is somewhat hilarious. Oh how on earth do we keep things safe and secure if everyone can see the code and verify what it does! Who would keep us safe if we turn our backs to unverifiable, unvetted, unprofitable security fixes, by for-profit companies!
> how on earth do we keep things safe and secure if everyone can see the code and verify what it does!
That's not always the silver bullet you seem to think it is. Have you ever tried to build something like Chromium, Firefox, or LLVM yourself? It's not realistic to do that on a mid tier let alone low end device.
Even when you go to the trouble of getting a local build set up, more often than not the build system immediately attempts to download opaque binary blobs of uncertain provenance. Try building some common pieces of software in a network isolated environment and you will likely be surprised at how poorly it goes.
If projects actually took this stuff seriously then you'd be able to bootstrap from a sectorlisp and pure human readable source code without any binary blobs or network access involved. Instead we have the abomination that is npm.
Debian manages to build Chromium, Firefox, and LLVM on servers of multiple architectures, including quite slow riscv64 machines, without any network access to the builds for any architecture.
See Bootstrappable Builds for starting from almost nothing, so far only GNU Guix and StageX have worked out how to start from the BB work to get a full distro. Should be fairly trivial for other distros too if they cared.
Bit-Reproducible infrastructure could also result in some of the wildest build distribution architectures if you think about it. You could publish sources and have people register like in APT mirrors to provide builds, and at the end of the day, the build from the largest bit-equal group is published.
I do see the Tor-Issue - a botnet or a well-supplied malicious actor could just flood it. And if you flip it - if you'd need agreement about the build output, it could also be poisoned with enough nodes to prevent releases for a critical security issue. I agree, I don't solve all supply chain issues in one comment :)
But that in turn could be helped with reputation. Maybe a node needs to supply 6 months of perfect builds - for testing as well - to become eligible. Which would be defeated by patience, but what isn't? It'd just have to be more annoying to breach the distributed build infrastructure than to plant a malicious developer.
This combination of reproducible, deterministic builds, tests across a number of probably-trustworthy sources is quite interesting, as it allows very heavy decentralization. I could just run an old laptop or two here to support. And then come compromise hundreds of these all across the world.
>It'd just have to be more annoying to breach the distributed build infrastructure than to plant a malicious developer.
It really wouldn't. You don't even need a powerful build server since you can mirror whatever someone else built. You can also buy / hack nodes of existing trusted people.
Torrent files are hashed, so it's exactly the same risk profile as the comment I was referring to. But generally hashing algorithms are collision-proof enough that what you're describing is basically impossible (requiring many years of compute time).
> They pay as little as humanly possible to cover their ass.
They probably spend more on the team who ends up writing the "We take your security very seriously" breach notification message than they do on "security people". At least until then get forced into brand-name external Cyber Security Consultants to "investigate" their breach and work out who they can plausibly blame it on that's not part of the C suite.
You are dismissing the seriousness of this. Their package manager is widely used. One would only need to compromise their build servers to wreak havoc.
Didn't they have a vulnerability in their firmware download tool like a minute ago?
The difference between OpenWRT and Linux distros is the amount of testing and visibility. OpenWRT is loaded on to residential devices and forgotten about, it doesn't have professional sysadmins babysitting it 24/7.
Remember the xz backdoor was only discovered because some autist at Microsoft noticed a microsecond difference in performance testing.
I'm confused why you're so honed in on OpenWRT as a third-party open-source project here when the vulnerability you quoted (TotoLink) was the official firmware update server of a brand of devices.
Is it "scary" to think about OpenWRT potentially getting hacked? If you get scared by theoretical possibilities in software, sure. Is it relevant? Not exactly. Are companies' official servers more secure than an open-source project's servers? In this case, apparently not.
What's scary is that OpenWRT is a project created by people who wanted a better solution than what was out there, and are therefore largely driven by a desire to create a good product.
Meanwhile, corporations are driven entirely by profit motive, so as long as it's more expensive to be vigilant about security than it is to be lax about it they will never improve.
Until companies which produce (and do not update) vulnerable equipment are penalized (e.g. charged with criminal negligence) for DDoS attacks using their hardware then the open-source projects are going to continue to be far more trustworthy and less vulnerable than corporations which mass-produce the cheapest hardware they can and then designating it as obsolete and unsupported as fast as possible to force more updates.
The disappointing thing is that the companies don't just ship the open source firmware on their devices from the factory. They rarely if ever have any marketable features the open source firmware doesn't -- it's more often the other way around -- and then you don't have a zillion unpatched devices when they decide to stop caring because the community continues to maintain the code.
What in that act says OpenWrt would be made illegal? If anything, OpenWrt would roll out automated security updates for a supported branched release to comply with these regulations.
Also, if you actually read it, there are exceptions for open source software!
A DDoS attack is often used to distract a company's security team. While the security staff is scrambling to get the website back online, the attackers use the chaos to conduct a more serious, stealthy attack.
I don't doubt there will have been sporadic examples of this, but what points to this "often" being the case? It seems like a tactic that wouldn't often pay off, since DDoS mitigation rarely involves relaxing security systems
Mistakes can be made during reconfigurations but you'd have to catch those while the issue is still live. Sounds like an advanced threat actor and not the run of the mill ransomware people (not that they're necessarily unsophisticated, but why'd they bother with these odds when there's low-hanging fruit to reliably exploit)
It was interesting to read that the record breaking attack caused no glitch whatsoever in the service MS provides. Which is so slow normally that I start to wonder if that is a strategy, having headroom for these kind of situations, no-one realizes slowdown when it is already slow. ;)
This is just a crazy thought, tangential to what are happening during an attack.
or rather the slowness problems of MS has nothing to do with hardware or infrastructure limitations. You cannot just throw infra at a problem to mask poorly written code beyond a point.
I suppose ISPs could be more restrictive about which routers they allow their customers to use, but I'm not sure I'm a fan of further lockdown in that department.
fun fact, part of the reason this botnet exists is because europe required the ability to install security updates unattended that you cannot disable and they compromised one of the servers that had the capability to push these updates compromising hundreds of thousands of routers.
If the vendor can't even secure their update server; how long do you think it would be until some RCE on these 100k un-patchable routers gets exploited?
The only people to blame for this is the vendor, and they failed on multiple levels here. It's not hard to sign a firmware, or even just fetch checksums from a different site than you serve the files from...
the problem is that these laws just make the problem bigger - instead of having to compromise 100 thousand routers they can just compromise a single update server from a vendor that doesn't care about security.
the fallout is some companies losing their revenue: https://status.neoprotect.net/ and other headaches for people all over the world
ok, let's redo this: instead of routers it's an IoT device. The router protects the IoT device from direct access so it is secure from majority of attack vectors - now an IoT device provider gets their server compromised and hundreds of thousands of IoT devices are now bots in a botnet due to the ability to forcefully push a security update.
I don't think it does outweigh the benefits, the real benefits would be punishing or/and banning vendors that do not secure their devices since using laws such as "timely updates" just promotes them to include sloppy (insecure) implementations for pushing said updates just to do bare minimum to comply with the law.
might be too old, my asus router updated and I could no longer disable updates and you could just look up the relevant law here: EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) 2024.
While it doesn't make it mandatory, it does require patching devices in a timely fasion which in other terms: requires forced updates - pushing updated firmware is not enough if you read between the lines.
Even stronger requirements come into effect at the end of 2027.
it's one of the (i believe) hundreds (at this point) of zero-days that is used to build this botnet, at this point they are using funds that they get from selling this botnet to purchase new zero days
Funny enough just got an error trying to reach to the blog
Proxy Error
The proxy server received an invalid response from an upstream server.
The proxy server could not handle the request
Reason: Error reading from remote server
Because every single nation would have to sign on to it allowing said agency to ignore sovereignty of each nation to come in and do their policing.
You'd also need to have every country not actively involved in these types of schemes yet we know some governments are directly benefiting from the scams/theft their citizens are perpetrating.
You'd also need to have every country think the things you want to police against are wrong. Again, we know that's just not true.
International DDoS busts and arrests do happen all the time.
Law enforcement takes time. The perpetrators of these attacks aren't hanging out in the open with their full names shielded only by the hope that their country won't extradite for political favor.
By the time the perpetrators are identified and a case is built, getting them charged isn't bottlenecked on the lack of an international agency. Any international law enforcement agency would be beholden to each country's own political wills and ideals, meaning any "teeth" they had would be no more effective than what we currenly have for extraditing people or cooperating with foreign police organizations.
The international organisation for stopping wars, human trafficking, money laundering, drug distribution etc. however capable they might be, haven't managed to stamp out any of those things.
I'd say a putative UN NetWatch would suffer from the same issues of funding and corruption and politics, but still we might have something better than this wild west lawlessness.
This is already the case in Germany and many other countries. Same for phone numbers. On the other hand, I get no spam calls, and I can't access the sites on https://cuiiliste.de/domains - censorship is amazing.
If spam calls is the price I have to pay to avoid censorship then I'm okay with that. We need resilient decentralized protocols, not centralized authoritarian bodies.
> The international organisation for stopping wars, human trafficking, money laundering, drug distribution etc. however capable they might be, haven't managed to stamp out any of those things.
They've never been expected to "stamp out" those things, any more than a city police department is expected to stamp out all crime and doctors are expected to stamp out all illness. Their mission is to reduce those things:
For warfare, they have been extremely successful relative to human history. War has actually become taboo and illegal, and very few happen. Look at history before the UN - it's a miracle. Think of the vision and confidence of people who, looking at 10,000 years of human history, immediately after two world wars, thought it was even possible, came up with effective strategy, did the hard work, and accomplished it.
I don't know the details of the other fields.
> I'd say a putative UN NetWatch would suffer from the same issues of funding and corruption and politics, but still we might have something better than this wild west lawlessness.
Politics and funding, and corruption, come with every human institution over a certain size, and especially with governments which can't exclude undesireable people: Democratic governments are the least corrupt, but if the people elect a corrupt representative or executive, then nobody can kick them out (unless they commit prosecutable crimes). And now imagine an association or confederation of governments, which is what the UN is.
So yes, the goal is to make something better. Otherwise, we might as well quit on everything.
It's national interest of China and Russia to see the West to fail. Why would they co-operate? They are willing to murder people, West and their own, so "law" enforcement means a bit different in international context.
China (or at least the CCP, I find the equivocation of the CCP with the country disagreeable) has had the desire or even need to get revenge for their "century of humiliation" for a long time.
They have a fundamentally different government and social model, basically a one person dictatorship that feels the need to micromanage and control their populace.
They absolutely love seeing democracy and businesses associated with it fail because it reinforces their perspective of the CCP model being superior and thus strengthens their perceived legitimacy (or even inevitability) of CCP control over China.
A rivalry, wanting to score points, wanting to gain standing at the expense of another, are all things that do not have much to do with wanting your opponent to collapse
It is China's national interests to see a stable America that can continue to maintain the post WWII world order that benefited China so much for so long. Without the US, who is going to maintain peace in the middle east, Africa and other places? without such peace, how could China export its goods and services?
"West" != America.
Your claim also implies that China and Russia are operating on the same level. That is laughable at best - Russia is a failed rogue state with the economic size comparable only to a Chinese province, it is left behind in ALL modern techs and its military hardware are aging fast. It is the complete opposite of the path took by China.
Besides the fact that not much happens in the international public sector, law enforcement is more about deterrence than prevention. Criminals aren't deterred by law enforcement, so the bad actors never stop. Human nature's a bitch.
If they did focus on prevention instead, most of this could be... prevented. Create a treaty that mandates how critical infrastructure technology is created/sold. Consumer routers will stop being shit at security, and home devices are slowed-down in upstream spamming. That's a good chunk of the denial-of-service market gone, with no need to police the world.
...but the criminals are smart and intentionally avoid attacking the powerful, so nobody cares. Same reason organized crime still exists. It's poor people caught up in gang violence and crime, not rich people, so it persists.
Since this is a distributed attack, I'm not really sure how that enforcement would look like? Am I missing something, are all these bots/zombies easily selectable and blockable?
Investigative powers should be able to at least find and seize the command and control servers, and hopefully track down people operating the command and control servers.
Some sort of international clearing house for ISPs to help identify and sequester compromised customers might be nice, too; but that doesn't need law enforcement powers; and maybe it already exists?
Because countries benefit from conducting cyber warfare, the most publicised of are north Korea and Russia which have large state sponsored hacking groups.
You can block the specific offending IPs without collateral damage.
CGNATs reuse IPs so any IP block rule fairly quickly becomes somebody else's IP that you shouldn't be blocking.
If, however, you use IPv6, you don't need CGNAT and, while addresses may change, a blocked address won't suddenly get recycled to an unsuspecting user. In addition, if the allocation is static, you can block the whole network range and the problematic devices can't change their allocation sufficiently to escape the IP block.
the real reason why these are a problem in the first place is because of cgnat and transit providers not implementing flowspec.
but these bad actors are not possible to track down in the first place since internet is unfortunately decentralized and things as simple as transactions submitted to bitcoin or etherium blockchain can be used as c&c
perfect, then we just nullroute at source with Flowspec, even if we change the goalposts a thousand times in this thread there does exist a technical solution to this problem.
Just not enough economic or political incentive to pay for it.
America already limits its upstream to China and Russia through a private companies such as Cloudflare and Spamhaus. It's often the case that for Chinese users seeking to escape censorship, once they've worked their way through the Chinese Great Firewall, they find themselves in front of the American one.
do you really think for example America would allow say Chinese prosecutors to arrest Americans on American soil and take them abroad to sentence them in a court that America has no influence over and then throw them in a prison which America doesn’t control?
When the deed is illegal in both places, they can be tried under either jurisdiction and convicted instead of continuing to roam free and fuck up the open web for everyone else. Yes I do think we'd want that
Borders currently get in the way but we needn't have law enforcement on foreign soil to solve that. Exchanging information and reliably acting upon it could be all these agencies need to do in their respective countries. When this proves effective aside from crime states that have no interest in upholding even their own laws (since dual illegality would probably be a prerequisite for any of this), they may eventually find themselves increasingly cut off and distrusted until they, too, cooperate or self-isolate like NK
Bad news, implied criticism of CCP policy (by acknowledging you'd change it) is an imprisonable offense. You're under arrest for violating the laws of China. You are not granted a trial. A joint unit comprised of the Ministry of State Security and the FBI will be at your house to pick you up and fly you to a Chinese black site tomorrow morning.
You should talk to a network engineer before making claims like this. There are mechanisms to curtail DDOS attacks at origin.
For a few reasons (political, economical) there’s little will to enact them, these attacks are so few and far between and you can pay your way out of them in most cases, so the incentives aren’t there for ISPs (whom are a commodity judged primarily on price and bandwidth)
you don’t stop the message to the botnet, thats impossible:
You detect the behaviour downstream and send a signal to the ISP that there is traffic that needs to he rate limited.
One mechanism for this is called RTBH (Remote Triggered BlackHole) which relies on community tagged prefixes of addresses exceeding rate limited to be blackholed from
forwarding traffic further in to the internet.
There’s also things like flowspec but a lot of things rely on proper trust between ASNs.
IP spoofing is pretty uncommon nowadays because everyone has anti-spoofing mechanisms in place and most ASNs often don't forward spoofed addresses outbound.
But as the sibling mentioned, even with spoofing, you can still follow the packet trail from your border routers upstream. I think the main thing we are lacking is just responsibility on the ISP side, if someone reaches out complaining that half of your customers are sending ddos attacks, maybe you need to do something about it. Most of these huge attacks are compromised routers or IoT devices (remember Mirai Botnet?).
Just because SOME ASNs don't have it in place doesn't mean it's not uncommon. In the link provided, 80% of all tracked network blocks for ipv4 are blocking spoofing. Though they only track 1000 ipv4 /24 blocks and their data is highly biased towards having spoofable ranges, considering their end goal is identifying spoofable networks!
The Microsoft blog suggests there was miminal source spoofing (although I don't know how they determine that). But if you can't trust the IP source, packet samples from your border router should indicate which upstream is sending those packets ... then you ask them to find the source... eventually you'll get somewhere ... but when the sources are distributed, it's not so helpful to find the source, unless there's a mechanism to stop the source from sending it.
When I was running servers that would routinely attract DDoSed at ~ 10 Gbps, I ended up always running a low sample rate packet capture. Anytime I noticed a DDoS, I could go and look at the packets. If you've got connectivity to sink and measure 15 Tbps of DDoS, you can probably influence your providers to take some sampled packet captures and look at them too.
Even without clear information from packet captures, 15 Tbps is going to make an impact on traffic graphs, and you can figure out sources from those, although it might be a bit tricky because the attack duration was reported at only 40 seconds, so if someone only has hourly stats, it might be too small to be noticed; but once a minute stats are pretty common.
Legal systems are so convoluted and so colossally heterogenous - also very protective of their ways - around the globe that miniscule collaborations require grandiose efforts to initiate and maintain. No chance these fast paced adversaries will be caught by the interplay of several dozens of reluctant dinosaur legal systems.
Tangential: once I was targeted by a pretty primitive scam. More than 10 years ago (after someone I love was naive and inexperienced, having a medium amount stolen in a sensitive and stressful time of this person's life). I recognised fast and having time and will I sarted to play along, pretending I bite the bait. Collecting info while acting. In parallel trying to connect local and international authorities to report an ongoing scam effort. I believe I tried 4 organizations in 3 different countries apparently involved, I believe one was dedicated to online scams, also trying to warn Western Union, they are about to be used for scam. I even went personally to a police station locally to get some advice on how to assist catching the criminals. Since all I encountered insisted to report my damages, so they could start an investigation on an actual loss happened, I furiously gave up and decided whenever I will be having financial trouble I will invest my efforts in scamming others. No-one cares catching those in act! So the thugs can be incredibly bold and dumb, like the one I encountered, it is no effort doing better.
As alluded to by morkalork, they definitely could if they wanted to, as the (most? of the) rest of the world doesn't seem to have this problem. As long as spammers keep paying telecoms & no law(s) forbidding this exist, it will continue.
> As long as spammers keep paying telecoms & no law(s) forbidding this exist, it will continue.
That's the trick. A lot of countries bill calls to cell phones at 10 cents a minute; in the US, calling is near zero cost. The US makes a great market for scammers to target because of low operating costs, penetration of globally usable payment cards, minimal language diversity.
Of course, these scams are forbidden by law, but that doesn't change the economics. Very few scam shops get busted; especially when most of them run from outside the US. STIR/SHAKEN helps a bit, but not much... without a effective mechanism to report unwanted calls that leads to those callers being ejected from the network as well as ejecting providers that are unresponsive to reports, there's not really hope of progress.
It would really help to understand why attack one endpoint with "the largest DDoS attack ever observed in the cloud". If it was important, it would be redundant in its CDN. Who paid for this attack and what did they gain?
You are assuming that DDoS is signal. It's not, it's the noise.
The idea of DDoS for hire is to bury your own tracks in as much network requests as possible, so that the other side is overwhelmed processing (or even storing) that dataset and won't find out what the real target was.
we were getting hit with attacks like this daily at some point and were forced to use cloudflare magic transit it's pretty random and you shouldn't read too deep into it as nearly every anti-ddos solution, host and isp has been hit with this botnet by now.
I used to run servers for a very popular service. I'm 99% sure people DDoSed our www for lolz and also to kick the tires on DDoS as a service vendors. We would get DDoS on a pretty regular basis, for exactly 90 seconds, +/- a few nodes that had bad clock sync and were 2 seconds off; which was exactly what you get from a free trial at DDoS as a service. I feel like we got a ransom request like once; but I can't remember if it actually corresponded to an attack, if it did, I don't think it was consequential.
Thankfully, it was almost always targetted at our www servers, which were not important for our service. Very occasionally, we'd get hit on the machines that we actually ran our service on, but between the consistent DDoS on www, and our own self-inflicted DDoS from defects in the client code we wrote for our users, our service was well prepared... if the DDoS went over line rate for the server, our hosting provider would null route it [1], but otherwise, we could manage line rate of udp reflection or tcp syn floods and what have you. From what I could tell, most attackers didn't retarget to our other servers when one got null routed.
[1] They did try a DDoS scrubbing service, but having our servers behind the scrubber was way worse than just null routing. Maybe the scrubbing could have been tuned, but as it was, it was better for us to just have the attacked servers lose connectivity to the public network.
As someone on the receiving end of these, I've yet to receive any explanation. Every other week we see the most basic of attacks against our infrastructure (http floods - GET / - for example), with no specific goal in mind and we never received any threats. I can only assume it's some disgruntled user or maybe a competitor, but it could also just be stray bullets. I don't know who used these IPs before us, though it's been several years we've owned them. Who knows.
yep, there's no consistency to their actions - basically hit a target and keep it down for as long as possible causing heavy business loss. to my knowledge none of the target servers have ever received a ransom request.
There is a big (opportunity) cost to this kind of thing, How is this worthwhile for anyone? I assume that its's not just a competitor. Is it really worth <insert evil country>'s time to temporarily upset one of of three big cloud providers? Is there a ransom behind the scenes?
Man, if you had that many nodes can you guys imagine how much cool tech you could build with that? Like you could literally rival Tor with one command. Or build a decentralized archive system. Yet, the only thing these nodes will end up doing is being used to prop up some losers ego. Literally what a waste. If you're going to commit crime at least do something cool.
I feel like posting the traffic output of the network might not be a great idea because they might do these attacks on purpose to market their network's capability.
Why wouldn't microsoft advertise this though? If they had the ability to take the attack and others might not, then it'll result in more customers for them.
it's an open secret at that point and the attacks are far larger than that are causing congestion world-wide from the time they wake up to the time they go to sleep.
> This attack lasted only 40 seconds but was roughly equivalent to streaming one million 4K videos simultaneously.
Who is this for? Is there anyone reading the article that can't grasp what a terrabit is but can somehow conceptualise one million 4k videos streaming simultaneously? I don't think anyone sits in that venn diagram.
An regular user would associate 4k is premium / expensive and difficult to use without better phones/network/plans/signal strength etc so the idea would be to be signal it is 1M times with a somewhat challenging thing for them.
Non-tech savy users know how live streams crash with sports like with Netflix recently during boxing etc or on Twitter last year and usually those come with some n Million users in kind of headlines or the like, so they have some reference to that scale.
As analogies go, there are worse examples. BleepingComputer is hardly the New Yorker or Atlantic, best we can hope for these days is a human is writing the article I suppose.
Yeah. That falls in the same bin as number of Olympic swimming pools or distance to the moon.
The best, meaningful comparison I've read is from Bill Bryson in A Short History of Nearly Everything. In it, he notes that there are 1M seconds in 11 days but 1B seconds takes 32 years.
I've always disliked the "it's like X amount of [resolution] video!!" Are we talking a UHD 4K Bluray? or 4K Netflix? or 4K YouTube? Bitrate is all that matters.
Azure AWS and cloudflare will survive, then everything else will pay them for protection; when all of the internet is captive, they will lobby for regulation to reduce the costs.
It would be better to get the regulation set up before stronger gatekeepers are created
The Microsoft article reads like a corporate press release. The original link contained additional pertinent information and research which is good for discussion.
The principles here are clear: we prefer the best third-party article to corporate press releases*, but at the same time we don't want blogspam (i.e. ripoffs that don't add anything interesting).
We really shouldn’t - this seems like perhaps one of the worst ideas one could propose in an era of rising authoritarian rule. Seems like a bad time to be putting silly restrictions on how folks route their traffic.
Ok, I'll be a bit more specific, banning businesses and the trade of proxies that are purposefully marked as residential, in order to evade firewall blocks, and even to evade proxy blocks.
You gotta draw the line in the sand somewhere, VPNs are already morally dubious, but if you ban the most shady of VPNs, residential proxies, then you can at least guarantee service providers the right to deny service to proxy users, while allowing proxy users to use the proxy everwhere they are welcome in.
Making them illegal seems far-fetched, but at this point something like email blacklists but for web services is becoming inevitable.
At the moment, that's what Cloudflare is doing. They're just not obvious enough, leading to people on forums (and here) asking "why do I constantly need to fill out captchas to enter websites".
>The Aisuru DDoS botnet operates as a DDoS-for-hire service with restricted clientele; operators have reportedly implemented preventive measures to avoid attacking governmental, law enforcement, military, and other national security properties. Most observed Aisuru attacks to date appear to be related to online gaming.
https://www.netscout.com/blog/asert/asert-threat-summary-ais...
So why? Like why would someone pay to take a game down? I see this all over reddit with different games but I just don't get the point. What's the benefit of taking down an online game for a couple of hours.
The other half comes from sever operators ddosing their competition. There is a lot of money to be made from paid cosmetics, ranks, moderator (demi-tyrant) status, etc on custom servers.
Final Fantasy XIV keeps getting hammered, likely Aisuru, off and on since at least September.
https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/news/detail/6b56814...
Are you mentioning the minecraft community by your message or any other gaming communities too
Anyone have any idea how much a 15 Tbps DDoS attack would cost?
Thousands of dollars? Tens of thousands?
I'd imagine the pricing is quite disconnected from the price of "legitimate" bandwidth. But I don't know in what direction.
For other games, maybe trying to interrupt some time limited event or tournament. Going all the way down the rabbit hole, if you're not already familiar take a look at how crazy things get in a game like EVE: Online.
Then of course there are the bored trolls and/or people who feel wronged by the game's developers or other players.
Taking a competitor offline for a few hours is a lot of money in a market business I expect.
there seems to be lot of weird stuff going on with gaming casinos the recent CoffeeZilla episode comes to mind, so wouldn’t be surprised if botnets are used
well, gaming and Krebs's blog: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/05/krebsonsecurity-hit-with...
https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/application-services/produc...
esports gambling and winning tournaments is big business.
> During the Fortnite Championship Series finals, a pair of pro players may have utilized denial of service attacks to disadvantage contesters [1]
[1] https://fortnitetracker.com/article/1087/ddos-scandal-from-c...
Not saying that's the case in this particular incident though.
esports gambling is big business
Most of the time crime groups are running extortion campaigns, amplification campaigns, etc. For example, if a competitor can benefit from them being down you may be able to sell that. Eventually we will probably see the invention of crowd-funded randsomware, where everyone must submit one verification can of crypto to unlock the hacked game servers.
If it's going to cost me about the same in terms of resources to target you and a bunch of other people colocated with you, it's a bit less obvious who launched it and why.
They weren't targeting Azure itself, per se, but some service which was hosted on Azure.
The IP address in question wasn't mentioned, so we're left to speculate what this was about.
lul wut?
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-white-house-ballroom-d...
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/09/microsoft-contributes-1-mill...
"Boeing, Microsoft and Amazon among big donors to Biden’s inauguration"
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/boeing-mi...
That's enough to explain it. But if you wanted to go more full shadowy conspiracy theory, someone arranged for a protection service that just so happens to work by giving some entity cleartext surveillance over much of the internet. Perhaps as a response to HTTPS everywhere being annoying.
I'm not suggesting that's the situation, but that it's the kind of possibility to keep in mind, intellectually, and it would be consistent with history.
Its just toxic behavior.
https://abyss.diath.net/img/20251118055501688.png
Cloudflare scrubs Aisuru botnet from top domains list - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45857836 - Nov 2025 (34 comments)
Aisuru botnet shifts from DDoS to residential proxies - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45741357 - Oct 2025 (59 comments)
DDoS Botnet Aisuru Blankets US ISPs in Record DDoS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45574393 - Oct 2025 (142 comments)
This is scary. Everyone lauds open source projects like OpenWRT but... who is watching their servers?
I imagine you can't run an army of security people on donations and a shoestring budget. Does OpenWRT use digital signing to mitigate this?
The build infrastructure is, of course, a juicy target: infect the artifact after building but before signing, and pwn millions of boxes before this is detected.
This is why bit-perfect reproducible builds are so important. OpenWRT in particular have that: https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-developer/security#reproducib...
That's not always the silver bullet you seem to think it is. Have you ever tried to build something like Chromium, Firefox, or LLVM yourself? It's not realistic to do that on a mid tier let alone low end device.
Even when you go to the trouble of getting a local build set up, more often than not the build system immediately attempts to download opaque binary blobs of uncertain provenance. Try building some common pieces of software in a network isolated environment and you will likely be surprised at how poorly it goes.
If projects actually took this stuff seriously then you'd be able to bootstrap from a sectorlisp and pure human readable source code without any binary blobs or network access involved. Instead we have the abomination that is npm.
https://buildd.debian.org/status/package.php?p=firefox-esr
See Bootstrappable Builds for starting from almost nothing, so far only GNU Guix and StageX have worked out how to start from the BB work to get a full distro. Should be fairly trivial for other distros too if they cared.
https://bootstrappable.org/ https://guix.gnu.org/blog/2023/the-full-source-bootstrap-bui... https://stagex.tools/
I do see the Tor-Issue - a botnet or a well-supplied malicious actor could just flood it. And if you flip it - if you'd need agreement about the build output, it could also be poisoned with enough nodes to prevent releases for a critical security issue. I agree, I don't solve all supply chain issues in one comment :)
But that in turn could be helped with reputation. Maybe a node needs to supply 6 months of perfect builds - for testing as well - to become eligible. Which would be defeated by patience, but what isn't? It'd just have to be more annoying to breach the distributed build infrastructure than to plant a malicious developer.
This combination of reproducible, deterministic builds, tests across a number of probably-trustworthy sources is quite interesting, as it allows very heavy decentralization. I could just run an old laptop or two here to support. And then come compromise hundreds of these all across the world.
https://bootstrappable.org/
It really wouldn't. You don't even need a powerful build server since you can mirror whatever someone else built. You can also buy / hack nodes of existing trusted people.
I have yet to experience a straight shot install or build of anything in an air gapped environment. Always need to hack things to make it work.
> run an army of security people
Do you think these private companies do this? They don't. They pay as little as humanly possible to cover their ass.
Botnets comprised of compromised routers is common and commercial/consumer routers are a far juicer target than openwrt.
They probably spend more on the team who ends up writing the "We take your security very seriously" breach notification message than they do on "security people". At least until then get forced into brand-name external Cyber Security Consultants to "investigate" their breach and work out who they can plausibly blame it on that's not part of the C suite.
It’s probably helpful that open source teams aren’t hampered by standards and 20 year outdated audit processes either.
Didn't they have a vulnerability in their firmware download tool like a minute ago?
The difference between OpenWRT and Linux distros is the amount of testing and visibility. OpenWRT is loaded on to residential devices and forgotten about, it doesn't have professional sysadmins babysitting it 24/7.
Remember the xz backdoor was only discovered because some autist at Microsoft noticed a microsecond difference in performance testing.
Is it "scary" to think about OpenWRT potentially getting hacked? If you get scared by theoretical possibilities in software, sure. Is it relevant? Not exactly. Are companies' official servers more secure than an open-source project's servers? In this case, apparently not.
Meanwhile, corporations are driven entirely by profit motive, so as long as it's more expensive to be vigilant about security than it is to be lax about it they will never improve.
Until companies which produce (and do not update) vulnerable equipment are penalized (e.g. charged with criminal negligence) for DDoS attacks using their hardware then the open-source projects are going to continue to be far more trustworthy and less vulnerable than corporations which mass-produce the cheapest hardware they can and then designating it as obsolete and unsupported as fast as possible to force more updates.
Plenty of stories of fairly major projects having evil commits snuck in that remain for months.
https://medium.com/@aleksamajkic/fake-sms-how-deep-does-the-...
https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2994
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/linux/malicious-packag...
https://www.cnx-software.com/2021/04/22/phd-students-willful...
I could go on but I trust this is a sufficient number of examples.
https://reproducible-builds.org/
Also, if you actually read it, there are exceptions for open source software!
(please prove me wrong, Alex)
Mistakes can be made during reconfigurations but you'd have to catch those while the issue is still live. Sounds like an advanced threat actor and not the run of the mill ransomware people (not that they're necessarily unsophisticated, but why'd they bother with these odds when there's low-hanging fruit to reliably exploit)
This is just a crazy thought, tangential to what are happening during an attack.
https://trends.builtwith.com/websitelist/Microsoft-Azure
Plenty of crappy websites on the list too.
Until then... There's gonna be a bigger wave.
If the vendor can't even secure their update server; how long do you think it would be until some RCE on these 100k un-patchable routers gets exploited?
The only people to blame for this is the vendor, and they failed on multiple levels here. It's not hard to sign a firmware, or even just fetch checksums from a different site than you serve the files from...
the fallout is some companies losing their revenue: https://status.neoprotect.net/ and other headaches for people all over the world
relevant law here: EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA).
While it doesn't make it mandatory, it does require patching devices in a timely fasion which in other terms: requires forced updates - pushing updated firmware is not enough if you read between the lines.
Even stronger requirements come into effect at the end of 2027.
You'd also need to have every country not actively involved in these types of schemes yet we know some governments are directly benefiting from the scams/theft their citizens are perpetrating.
You'd also need to have every country think the things you want to police against are wrong. Again, we know that's just not true.
Law enforcement takes time. The perpetrators of these attacks aren't hanging out in the open with their full names shielded only by the hope that their country won't extradite for political favor.
By the time the perpetrators are identified and a case is built, getting them charged isn't bottlenecked on the lack of an international agency. Any international law enforcement agency would be beholden to each country's own political wills and ideals, meaning any "teeth" they had would be no more effective than what we currenly have for extraditing people or cooperating with foreign police organizations.
I'd say a putative UN NetWatch would suffer from the same issues of funding and corruption and politics, but still we might have something better than this wild west lawlessness.
Careful what you wish for. Before you know it you can't have an IP without your ID.
They've never been expected to "stamp out" those things, any more than a city police department is expected to stamp out all crime and doctors are expected to stamp out all illness. Their mission is to reduce those things:
For warfare, they have been extremely successful relative to human history. War has actually become taboo and illegal, and very few happen. Look at history before the UN - it's a miracle. Think of the vision and confidence of people who, looking at 10,000 years of human history, immediately after two world wars, thought it was even possible, came up with effective strategy, did the hard work, and accomplished it.
I don't know the details of the other fields.
> I'd say a putative UN NetWatch would suffer from the same issues of funding and corruption and politics, but still we might have something better than this wild west lawlessness.
Politics and funding, and corruption, come with every human institution over a certain size, and especially with governments which can't exclude undesireable people: Democratic governments are the least corrupt, but if the people elect a corrupt representative or executive, then nobody can kick them out (unless they commit prosecutable crimes). And now imagine an association or confederation of governments, which is what the UN is.
So yes, the goal is to make something better. Otherwise, we might as well quit on everything.
But who will suppress attempts to go beyond the blackwall then?
They have a fundamentally different government and social model, basically a one person dictatorship that feels the need to micromanage and control their populace.
They absolutely love seeing democracy and businesses associated with it fail because it reinforces their perspective of the CCP model being superior and thus strengthens their perceived legitimacy (or even inevitability) of CCP control over China.
It is China's national interests to see a stable America that can continue to maintain the post WWII world order that benefited China so much for so long. Without the US, who is going to maintain peace in the middle east, Africa and other places? without such peace, how could China export its goods and services?
"West" != America.
Your claim also implies that China and Russia are operating on the same level. That is laughable at best - Russia is a failed rogue state with the economic size comparable only to a Chinese province, it is left behind in ALL modern techs and its military hardware are aging fast. It is the complete opposite of the path took by China.
You mean Team America, World Police?
Besides the fact that not much happens in the international public sector, law enforcement is more about deterrence than prevention. Criminals aren't deterred by law enforcement, so the bad actors never stop. Human nature's a bitch.
If they did focus on prevention instead, most of this could be... prevented. Create a treaty that mandates how critical infrastructure technology is created/sold. Consumer routers will stop being shit at security, and home devices are slowed-down in upstream spamming. That's a good chunk of the denial-of-service market gone, with no need to police the world.
...but the criminals are smart and intentionally avoid attacking the powerful, so nobody cares. Same reason organized crime still exists. It's poor people caught up in gang violence and crime, not rich people, so it persists.
Some sort of international clearing house for ISPs to help identify and sequester compromised customers might be nice, too; but that doesn't need law enforcement powers; and maybe it already exists?
But here we are in 2025 still running IPv4 with CGNAT, so we can't.
CGNATs reuse IPs so any IP block rule fairly quickly becomes somebody else's IP that you shouldn't be blocking.
If, however, you use IPv6, you don't need CGNAT and, while addresses may change, a blocked address won't suddenly get recycled to an unsuspecting user. In addition, if the allocation is static, you can block the whole network range and the problematic devices can't change their allocation sufficiently to escape the IP block.
but these bad actors are not possible to track down in the first place since internet is unfortunately decentralized and things as simple as transactions submitted to bitcoin or etherium blockchain can be used as c&c
Literally the same as economic sanctions. The internet is a network of peers “trading” bits and bytes after all.
North Korea doesn't care if you limit their internet they already allow people to go outside their own.
Just not enough economic or political incentive to pay for it.
Borders currently get in the way but we needn't have law enforcement on foreign soil to solve that. Exchanging information and reliably acting upon it could be all these agencies need to do in their respective countries. When this proves effective aside from crime states that have no interest in upholding even their own laws (since dual illegality would probably be a prerequisite for any of this), they may eventually find themselves increasingly cut off and distrusted until they, too, cooperate or self-isolate like NK
For a few reasons (political, economical) there’s little will to enact them, these attacks are so few and far between and you can pay your way out of them in most cases, so the incentives aren’t there for ISPs (whom are a commodity judged primarily on price and bandwidth)
You detect the behaviour downstream and send a signal to the ISP that there is traffic that needs to he rate limited.
One mechanism for this is called RTBH (Remote Triggered BlackHole) which relies on community tagged prefixes of addresses exceeding rate limited to be blackholed from forwarding traffic further in to the internet.
There’s also things like flowspec but a lot of things rely on proper trust between ASNs.
But as the sibling mentioned, even with spoofing, you can still follow the packet trail from your border routers upstream. I think the main thing we are lacking is just responsibility on the ISP side, if someone reaches out complaining that half of your customers are sending ddos attacks, maybe you need to do something about it. Most of these huge attacks are compromised routers or IoT devices (remember Mirai Botnet?).
https://spoofer.caida.org/summary.php
When I was running servers that would routinely attract DDoSed at ~ 10 Gbps, I ended up always running a low sample rate packet capture. Anytime I noticed a DDoS, I could go and look at the packets. If you've got connectivity to sink and measure 15 Tbps of DDoS, you can probably influence your providers to take some sampled packet captures and look at them too.
Even without clear information from packet captures, 15 Tbps is going to make an impact on traffic graphs, and you can figure out sources from those, although it might be a bit tricky because the attack duration was reported at only 40 seconds, so if someone only has hourly stats, it might be too small to be noticed; but once a minute stats are pretty common.
There's layer upon layer of relays now, and meshed C2C networks.
Lots of DNS fastflux too
Tangential: once I was targeted by a pretty primitive scam. More than 10 years ago (after someone I love was naive and inexperienced, having a medium amount stolen in a sensitive and stressful time of this person's life). I recognised fast and having time and will I sarted to play along, pretending I bite the bait. Collecting info while acting. In parallel trying to connect local and international authorities to report an ongoing scam effort. I believe I tried 4 organizations in 3 different countries apparently involved, I believe one was dedicated to online scams, also trying to warn Western Union, they are about to be used for scam. I even went personally to a police station locally to get some advice on how to assist catching the criminals. Since all I encountered insisted to report my damages, so they could start an investigation on an actual loss happened, I furiously gave up and decided whenever I will be having financial trouble I will invest my efforts in scamming others. No-one cares catching those in act! So the thugs can be incredibly bold and dumb, like the one I encountered, it is no effort doing better.
edit: grammar
That's the trick. A lot of countries bill calls to cell phones at 10 cents a minute; in the US, calling is near zero cost. The US makes a great market for scammers to target because of low operating costs, penetration of globally usable payment cards, minimal language diversity.
Of course, these scams are forbidden by law, but that doesn't change the economics. Very few scam shops get busted; especially when most of them run from outside the US. STIR/SHAKEN helps a bit, but not much... without a effective mechanism to report unwanted calls that leads to those callers being ejected from the network as well as ejecting providers that are unresponsive to reports, there's not really hope of progress.
It would really help to understand why attack one endpoint with "the largest DDoS attack ever observed in the cloud". If it was important, it would be redundant in its CDN. Who paid for this attack and what did they gain?
The idea of DDoS for hire is to bury your own tracks in as much network requests as possible, so that the other side is overwhelmed processing (or even storing) that dataset and won't find out what the real target was.
That's literally the strategy of APT28/29.
Thankfully, it was almost always targetted at our www servers, which were not important for our service. Very occasionally, we'd get hit on the machines that we actually ran our service on, but between the consistent DDoS on www, and our own self-inflicted DDoS from defects in the client code we wrote for our users, our service was well prepared... if the DDoS went over line rate for the server, our hosting provider would null route it [1], but otherwise, we could manage line rate of udp reflection or tcp syn floods and what have you. From what I could tell, most attackers didn't retarget to our other servers when one got null routed.
[1] They did try a DDoS scrubbing service, but having our servers behind the scrubber was way worse than just null routing. Maybe the scrubbing could have been tuned, but as it was, it was better for us to just have the attacked servers lose connectivity to the public network.
is what I'll call bugs from now
There is a big (opportunity) cost to this kind of thing, How is this worthwhile for anyone? I assume that its's not just a competitor. Is it really worth <insert evil country>'s time to temporarily upset one of of three big cloud providers? Is there a ransom behind the scenes?
Who is this for? Is there anyone reading the article that can't grasp what a terrabit is but can somehow conceptualise one million 4k videos streaming simultaneously? I don't think anyone sits in that venn diagram.
Non-tech savy users know how live streams crash with sports like with Netflix recently during boxing etc or on Twitter last year and usually those come with some n Million users in kind of headlines or the like, so they have some reference to that scale.
As analogies go, there are worse examples. BleepingComputer is hardly the New Yorker or Atlantic, best we can hope for these days is a human is writing the article I suppose.
The best, meaningful comparison I've read is from Bill Bryson in A Short History of Nearly Everything. In it, he notes that there are 1M seconds in 11 days but 1B seconds takes 32 years.
Only way is to secure your IoT devices/routers/cameras/etc.
I'd rather these attacks continue, than they not exist at all, because the latter is only possible in a world without any freedom.
It would be better to get the regulation set up before stronger gatekeepers are created
IoT botnet. Just read that again, we're literally inventing problems where none needs to exist.
IoT adds basically null or negative value, except to nerds who like to think they're smarter than other people by consuming the latest e-slop.
Its all so tiresome.
What's the point of this? Are they continuously running DDoS somewhere and 40 second is what the buyer paid for?
The Microsoft article reads like a corporate press release. The original link contained additional pertinent information and research which is good for discussion.
The principles here are clear: we prefer the best third-party article to corporate press releases*, but at the same time we don't want blogspam (i.e. ripoffs that don't add anything interesting).
* https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
You gotta draw the line in the sand somewhere, VPNs are already morally dubious, but if you ban the most shady of VPNs, residential proxies, then you can at least guarantee service providers the right to deny service to proxy users, while allowing proxy users to use the proxy everwhere they are welcome in.
on a more serious note, it's just not really possible since most residential proxy sites are botnets :)
At the moment, that's what Cloudflare is doing. They're just not obvious enough, leading to people on forums (and here) asking "why do I constantly need to fill out captchas to enter websites".