Category Archives: DDoS Criminals

Hacktivist DDOS Attack Motives: What They Predict

Hacktivist DDOS Attack Motives: What They Predict

Hacktivist DDoS attack motives are listed in almost every security blog going: geopolitics, protest, revenge, clout within a channel. What almost none of them do is join the motive to the attack you actually receive at 09:00 on a Tuesday. That link matters, because motive is a forecasting tool. Once you accept that the attacker’s success metric is coverage rather than your revenue loss, the shape of the incident becomes predictable, and so does the list of surfaces that will fail first.

This piece is written for the people who sign the protection contract and run the incident bridge, not for policy analysts trying to map the ideology.

What actually drives hacktivist DDoS attack motives

Four drivers cover most of what UK organisations see. Political or geopolitical grievance, usually tied to a conflict, a sanctions decision or a government position. Protest against a named policy, planning decision or contract award. Retaliation for something a named executive or organisation said in public. And status, which is the one defenders underrate: in a coordinating channel with a few thousand subscribers, posting a screenshot of a downed council homepage earns reputation in a way that a quiet, damaging intrusion never will.

Attention is the objective. Not extortion, not competitive harm, not data. The campaign is built so that a claim can be posted, reposted and, ideally, picked up by a journalist who does not check it. That single fact explains the duration, the target list and the vectors.

Where the lines blur

Three complications are worth stating plainly. State-aligned groups adopt hacktivist branding because deniability is cheap and the aesthetic is established. Criminal crews borrow political language to muddy attribution or to recruit. And ransom demands now appear mid-campaign, sometimes days after a political claim, from the same or an adjacent account.

If you are working out what to do about a ransom DDoS attack, the technical response does not change: you mitigate, you do not pay, and you preserve evidence. The legal and reporting picture does change, because an extortion demand brings a different set of obligations and a different conversation with your insurer and your board. Treat every motive claim as unverified attribution, including the political ones. The group claiming your outage may not have caused it, and the group that caused it may not be the one you think.

Competitive sabotage and gaming disputes behave differently. Those attackers want an effect and do not want an audience, so they are quieter, more patient and more willing to run for hours. A hacktivist campaign that runs for six hours is unusual. A gaming grudge that runs for six hours is Tuesday.

How motive shapes the attack you actually see

Attention-driven campaigns are short and rhythmic. They cluster around a fixed point in time: a parliamentary vote, a court date, a contract announcement, a sanctions package, the anniversary of something. Waves of ten to thirty minutes, repeated, are far more common than sustained pressure, because a burst is enough to generate a screenshot from a public reachability checker and a burst costs less booter credit.

The toolkit is unglamorous. Rented booter and stresser capacity, reflection and amplification floods against the network edge, and plain HTTP GET floods pointed at whatever endpoint is most expensive to serve. Site search is the perennial favourite, followed by login pages and any URL with a query string that defeats the cache. The volunteer-tool era of Operation Payback, with participants running LOIC and HOIC from their own machines, has largely given way to rented botnet and stresser capacity coordinated through chat channels, which is why a handful of organisers can now generate more traffic than a few thousand volunteers once did.

Target selection follows the same logic as everything else. Homepages, public-facing portals, authoritative nameservers, anything with an address a reader will recognise. Not the claims processing system. Not the back-office integration that would genuinely hurt if it stopped.

Plenty of claimed campaigns sit well under 10 Gbps and well under an hour. That sounds survivable, and against a properly protected estate it is. The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center made the point in a public notice on 4 November 2022, observing that hacktivist DDoS activity against critical infrastructure had produced limited operational impact while generating publicity out of proportion to the damage. The gap between impact and publicity is the thing to plan around. It is also why a modest flood still takes sites down: one unprotected surface is all the campaign needs, and modest is more than enough to saturate a registrar’s nameservers or a single origin VM.

Who gets picked, and why symbolism beats value

The recurring sectors will not surprise anyone: DDoS attacks on government websites and local council portals, NHS trusts and healthcare providers, airports and airlines, law firms acting on contested matters, broadcasters and news sites. High recognisability, public-facing, and easy to describe in a one-line post.

Collateral exposure is where organisations get caught out. Your payment page, your booking engine, your DNS provider and your CDN-hosted assets carry your brand and your reputation, but not necessarily your controls. When a third-party checkout goes dark, the screenshot still has your logo on it.

Supplier exposure works the same way. Organisations get targeted for a client they act for, a contract they won or a position their parent company took, rather than anything they did themselves. The attempted attacks on the Vatican’s website are a useful illustration of the pattern: a symbolic institution picked for what it represents, an attack claimed loudly, and an outcome rather less dramatic than the claim. Once a name appears on a circulated target list, unrelated participants join in simply because the list exists. Removal from the list is not a thing you can request.

Verifying a claim of responsibility against your own evidence

Here is the part no one else covers, and it is the defence that most often decides how the incident is reported. Hacktivist campaigns are optimised for narrative. If you cannot produce request rates, regional reachability and edge logs for the claimed window, a fifteen-minute partial slowdown gets written up as a day-long outage, and you are arguing from the back foot with your regulator, your insurer and the trade press.

Check three surfaces, in order:

  1. Authoritative DNS. Query your nameservers directly from multiple regions. If resolution failed, nothing downstream matters, and the web tier logs will look misleadingly quiet.
  2. Network and transport. Interface counters, upstream flow data, any scrubbing provider’s traffic graph for the window. Look for volume and for the vector mix.
  3. Application layer. Requests per second per endpoint, cache hit ratio, origin response times, 5xx rates. A GET flood on search shows up as a single endpoint carrying a request rate it has never carried before.

Then separate real impact from a reposted screenshot. Public checker tools report from one vantage point and cache aggressively; a red tick on such a site is not evidence of an outage. Synthetic monitoring from several regions, plus your own edge logs, is. Our 10-minute triage for telling a DDoS from an ordinary outage covers the sequence in more detail, and it is worth rehearsing before you need it.

Capture the evidence in the first hours, not the following week: precise timestamps in UTC with your local offset, vector breakdown, source ASNs and country spread, packet and request rates, the mitigation actions taken and when, and screenshots of the claiming post with its own timestamp. Insurers ask for it. Regulators ask for it. Any realistic legal route depends on it.

Ask your provider for a post-attack report and check the contract says what it must contain. Per-vector and per-ASN detail, start and end times, peak and sustained rates, and which rules fired. Where a reseller sits between you and the scrubbing network, that report often arrives late and thin, because the reseller is asking someone else for it too.

The defences that hold against attention-driven attacks

Burst-shaped protest traffic and on-demand mitigation are a poor fit. Detection, human decision, BGP announcement and route convergence all stack up, and a campaign built around a twenty-minute window can finish, be claimed and be screenshotted before your traffic ever reaches a scrubbing centre. Always-on for the symbolic hostnames, on-demand for the rest, is usually the honest compromise; the trade-offs in cost and latency are set out in our comparison of always-on versus on-demand DDoS protection.

Volume is rarely the reason a symbolic target falls over. Origin IP leakage is. Stale A records on a decommissioned subdomain, a mail or staging host on the same range, an origin address sitting in certificate transparency history from a certificate issued three years ago. A 5 Gbps direct-to-origin flood beats a proxy that was never bypassed at all. Audit your own DNS zone and CT logs before an attacker does, and lock the origin to accept traffic only from your provider’s ranges.

Authoritative DNS is the layer most often left unmanaged on exactly the sites hacktivists pick. Councils, small agencies and campaign microsites routinely run registrar-bundled nameservers with no anycast spread and no mitigation, so the nameservers fall before the web tier is even touched. Closing that gap is cheap relative to everything else you will spend, and our guide to DNS DDoS attack protection and the gaps most estates leave open lists what to check.

At the application layer, three controls do most of the work against protest traffic: rate limits on search and login with a sensible response for exceeded limits, full-page caching of the homepage and other high-traffic public pages so the origin is not touched, and a static fallback page hosted somewhere completely separate from your main infrastructure.

Finally, the contract. Managed should mean pre-attack tuning against your real traffic baseline, named escalation contacts on both sides, explicit authority for the provider to change policy without waiting for your sign-off, and a defined report. If nobody on the provider’s side can act at 03:00 without waking your CTO, you have bought monitoring, not management.

Preparing before your organisation becomes a symbol

Motive is predictive, so watch the triggers. Contract awards, public statements by executives, sanctions news touching your sector, court dates, planning votes, and sector-wide campaigns announced days in advance in open channels. A contested planning vote at 09:00 is a scheduled risk event, the same as a product launch.

Picture that council: an amplification flood against the network edge, an HTTP GET flood on the site search endpoint, and authoritative DNS sitting on registrar-bundled nameservers with no protection. The web tier might hold. The nameservers will not, and the outage will be total, which is the screenshot the campaign wanted.

Your comms plan should not feed the objective. Factual status updates on a status page hosted off your main infrastructure; no engagement with the claiming channel, no quoting it, no naming it; one named person who signs off wording; and an agreed line that describes impact and restoration without confirming attribution you have not verified. Resist the temptation to say “we repelled a major attack”if it was 4 Gbps for eleven minutes. Someone will check.

On the legal side, unauthorised acts impairing the operation of a computer are an offence under section 3 of the Computer Misuse Act 1990, as amended by the Police and Justice Act 2006. Report through Action Fraud, and use the National Cyber Security Centre reporting route where the incident is significant or touches critical services. Be realistic about prosecution: attribution across borders is hard and cases are slow, and what makes any outcome possible is the evidence you preserved in the first 24 hours. Our UK playbook for legal action after a DDoS attack sets out the sequence.

Keep the pre-attack checklist short enough that people actually do it: tested failover, a cached status page off your main infrastructure, a provider contact tree with out-of-hours numbers that someone has rung this quarter, and a rehearsed ten-minute triage. Read against the grain of the loud claims, hacktivist DDoS attack motives tell you to expect something short, noisy, symbolically aimed and technically ordinary, and to spend your money on the surfaces that fail quietly while everyone is watching the homepage.

Frequently Asked Questions

What motivates hacktivist DDoS attacks compared with criminal ones?

Hacktivists want attention: coverage, screenshots and status within a coordinating channel, usually tied to a political grievance, a policy, a contract or something someone said in public. Criminal attackers want money or a commercial effect, so they are quieter, more persistent and less interested in being seen. That difference shows up in duration, target choice and whether a claim is posted at all.

Are hacktivist DDoS attacks usually large, or is the volume overstated?

Claims are frequently overstated. Many campaigns run well under 10 Gbps and under an hour, and the FBI’s IC3 notice of 4 November 2022 observed that hacktivist DDoS activity against critical infrastructure produced limited operational impact while attracting outsized publicity. Small is still enough to take down unprotected authoritative DNS or a leaked origin address.

How can we tell whether a claimed attack actually affected our site?

Check authoritative DNS resolution, then network and transport counters, then per-endpoint request rates and error codes for the claimed window. Compare against multi-region synthetic monitoring rather than a public reachability checker, which reports from one vantage point. If your own telemetry shows no deviation, the claim is unsupported and you should say so with data rather than assertion.

Should we say anything publicly when a group claims an attack on us?

Publish factual status and restoration updates on a status page hosted separately from your main infrastructure, and say nothing that engages the claiming channel or amplifies its name. Do not confirm attribution you cannot verify. One named person should sign off all wording, and the line should describe user impact and timings, not adjectives.

Is launching a hacktivist DDoS attack illegal in the UK?

Yes. Deliberately impairing the operation of a computer without authorisation is an offence under section 3 of the Computer Misuse Act 1990, as amended by the Police and Justice Act 2006, and political motivation is not a defence. Participation using a booter service counts, as does supplying or operating one.

Does always-on protection make sense if attacks only last minutes?

For the hostnames most likely to be targeted, yes, precisely because they last minutes. On-demand diversion has to detect, decide, announce and converge, which can consume most of a twenty-minute burst. Running always-on for the symbolic public hostnames and on-demand for the wider estate is normally the sensible balance of cost and coverage.



DDOS Attack Penalties and Sentences in the UK Explained

DDOS Attack Penalties and Sentences in the UK Explained

A defendant who rents ten minutes of botnet capacity for the price of a takeaway, points it at a school’s exam portal and walks away thinking nothing will come of it is, on paper, exposed to one of the heaviest maximum penalties in English criminal law. In practice, most of them get a suspended sentence. That gap between the statutory ceiling and the real-world DDoS attack penalties and sentence outcomes is the part almost every guide skips, and it matters as much to the victim organisation as it does to the offender.

The short version: the law is severe, the charging rate is low, and the reason it is low is usually evidence. Not attribution. Evidence.

Which UK laws set DDoS attack penalties, and what the maximums are

The governing statute is the Computer Misuse Act 1990. Section 3 covers unauthorised acts with intent to impair, or recklessness as to impairing, the operation of a computer. That is the section a denial-of-service attack normally lands on, and it carries a maximum of ten years on indictment.

Denial of service was not always so clearly covered. A 2005 case involving a teenager who flooded his former employer’s mail server with emails ended in acquittal at first instance, and the Police and Justice Act 2006 amendments rewrote section 3 specifically to put impairment offences beyond argument. The wording now reaches temporary impairment, and recklessness is enough. You do not have to intend the outage.

Section 3A is the one that catches customers, not just operators. Making, adapting, supplying or offering to supply an article for use in a section 1, 3 or 3ZA offence is an offence; so is obtaining such an article with a view to its supply. Buying a subscription to a booter or stresser panel can engage section 3A, which carries a two-year maximum on indictment, where the article is obtained with a view to supplying it on; a customer who simply uses the panel is charged under sections 1 and 3 for the attacks themselves.

Then there is section 3ZA, inserted by the Serious Crime Act 2015. It applies where an unauthorised act causes, or creates a significant risk of, serious damage. The general maximum is fourteen years. Where the damage is to human welfare or national security, the maximum is life imprisonment. It has been used sparingly, and it is aimed at consequences a court can see: disruption to food or fuel supply, to health services, to transport, to systems of national importance.

Other offences stack. A ransom demand brings blackmail under section 21 of the Theft Act 1968, with a fourteen-year maximum. Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 confiscation proceedings follow criminal benefit, which for a booter operator means subscription revenue. Where a stresser site advertises itself as a legitimate load-testing service and takes card payments, Fraud Act 2006 charges can enter the picture too.

From statutory maximum to actual sentence: how courts decide

Here is the structural point most coverage misses. The Sentencing Council has no offence-specific guideline for Computer Misuse Act offences. Judges work from the General guideline: overarching principles, in force since 1 October 2019, which asks the court to assess culpability and harm, find a starting point by reference to the statutory maximum and comparable cases, then adjust.

Read that again from the victim’s side. Where there is no tariff table, the harm assessment is built largely from what the prosecution can put in front of the court, and the prosecution builds it from what you gave the police. A vague statement that “the website was down for a while and customers complained”produces a low harm finding. A reconstructed timeline with downtime to the minute, lost transaction volume, staff hours diverted and a named service that failed produces a different one.

Factors that push sentences towards custody are consistent across reported UK cases: repeated attacks over a sustained period, targeting of hospitals, schools, banks or emergency services, selling attacks for profit or running the panel rather than merely buying from it, and publicising the attack or the victim’s data afterwards.

Factors that regularly keep defendants out of prison are equally consistent. Youth. An early guilty plea, which under the Sentencing Council’s reduction guideline attracts credit of up to one third if entered at the first stage of proceedings. A diagnosis of autism or another neurodevelopmental condition, supported by a psychiatric report, which can affect both culpability and the court’s view of whether custody would be disproportionately damaging. No previous convictions. Real cooperation with investigators.

Put those together and the common outcome for a first-time individual offender who bought attacks rather than sold them is a suspended sentence, a community order with unpaid work, or a rehabilitation activity requirement. Custody becomes far more likely for panel operators, for repeat offenders who breach existing orders, and for anyone who attached a demand for money.

The penalties that are not a sentence at all

Ask anyone who has been through it and the sentence is rarely the worst part.

Devices get seized under PACE 1984 powers and forensically imaged. Phones, laptops, games consoles, the family router in some cases. Retention runs for as long as the material is needed for the investigation and any proceedings, which in a digital forensics backlog can mean many months. Bail conditions frequently restrict internet use or require it to be monitored.

Courts can impose a Serious Crime Prevention Order under the Serious Crime Act 2007, lasting up to five years, with terms restricting computer and network use, requiring disclosure of accounts and devices, and requiring notification of changes of address. Breach is itself an offence carrying up to five years. For anyone hoping to work in IT, an SCPO plus an unspent conviction under the Computer Misuse Act is close to disqualifying for roles that need security clearance or a clean DBS check.

The National Crime Agency’s Cyber Choices programme is the diversion route, and it is the reason a good number of teenage booter customers never see a courtroom. Regional Cyber Crime Units use it to engage young people identified in booter site user databases, often through a home visit rather than an arrest. Diversion stops being realistic once there is financial gain, once the targets include critical services, and once there has been a prior warning that was ignored.

Collateral consequences employers underestimate: vetting failures, loss of professional registration, refusal of US and other visas at the point of application, and named reporting in local press that outlives the conviction by years.

Ransom DDoS and hacktivist attacks: where sentences climb

A ransom demand changes the legal picture more than attack size does. Two hundred gigabits per second with no demand is a section 3 offence. Two gigabits per second with an unwarranted demand backed by menaces is section 3 plus blackmail plus a POCA confiscation route, and the sentencing arithmetic shifts accordingly. The history of organised cyber-extortion gangs receiving long custodial terms reflects exactly that: it is the extortion, not the packet rate, that drives the number.

There is a practical instruction buried in this for victims. The demand itself, the email, the note in a form submission, the message pasted into a support ticket, is often the single most useful piece of evidence you will ever hold. Preserve it verbatim with full headers. Do not delete it, do not forward it around and lose the original, and do not let a well-meaning support agent close the ticket.

Claimed political motive is not a defence. Hacktivist groups that announce attacks on government sites or NHS trusts sometimes seem to believe otherwise. Motive does shape how a court assesses harm, and attacks on public services push harm findings upward, because the people inconvenienced are patients and claimants rather than shareholders. Attribution of motive, though, should stay an open question in your own incident reporting; write what the traffic did, not who you think was behind it.

Paying rarely ends the campaign. Payment marks you as a payer, funds the next round, and complicates any later prosecution by introducing questions about the transaction itself and, for regulated firms, about sanctions exposure.

Why prosecutions are rare, and what that means for victims

Attribution is genuinely hard. Rented capacity from a booter or botnet-for-hire service means the source addresses belong to compromised devices and abused reflectors, not to the person who pressed the button. Add a VPN layer and cryptocurrency payment and the trail to a human being runs through several jurisdictions.

Jurisdiction is the second brake. The Computer Misuse Act has broad extraterritorial reach where there is a significant link to the UK, so an overseas offender attacking a UK business can in principle be prosecuted here. Mutual legal assistance requests take months, sometimes longer, and prosecutors make hard choices about which cases justify that effort. Coordinated operations do happen: the takedown of Webstresser.org in April 2018, run by Dutch police and Europol with NCA involvement, removed what was then one of the largest DDoS-for-hire services and led to action against users across several countries. The NCA also confirmed in March 2023 that it had been running fake booter sites to collect data on people trying to buy attacks.

The third brake, and the one you can actually influence, is the evidential threshold. The Crown Prosecution Service applies the Full Code Test: sufficient evidence for a realistic prospect of conviction, and a prosecution in the public interest. Patchy logging kills cases at the first limb. If you cannot show the court what arrived, when, from where and what it did, there is nothing to convict on regardless of how confident everyone is about who did it.

Set expectations accordingly. Compensation orders in these cases tend to be modest and constrained by the defendant’s means, which for a nineteen-year-old with no assets means very little. Civil recovery against an identified and solvent defendant is rare. Cyber insurance and business interruption cover, properly evidenced, usually matter far more to the balance sheet than the sentence does.

Building an evidence trail your DDoS provider can actually supply

This is where procurement decisions made eighteen months ago decide whether a prosecution is possible.

A usable attack report is not the PDF your account manager sends with a nice bandwidth graph and a congratulatory note. Sales-deck-grade summaries are worthless in court. What a prosecution needs is: timestamps accurate to the second and tied to a known time source; source address distribution and autonomous system breakdown; a vector breakdown separating, for example, UDP reflection from HTTP request floods; packet and request rates at peak and over time; every mitigation action taken and when; and residual impact on origin infrastructure. Plus a named engineer who can attest to all of it in a witness statement.

So ask the awkward questions before you sign, not after the incident:

  • How long are attack logs and flow records retained, and at what granularity after the first thirty days?
  • Is raw packet capture available on request, and is there a charge or a time limit on that request?
  • Who inside the provider is authorised to produce and sign a statement for police or civil proceedings, and has anyone there done it before?
  • Does the report cover DNS query traffic and application-layer requests, or only network-layer volumetrics?
  • What happens to the evidence if you terminate the contract mid-investigation?

Most buyers never raise any of this. They negotiate hard on time-to-mitigate SLA wording and never once ask what the provider can prove afterwards.

Two architectural gaps produce incidents with almost no usable evidence at all. The first is origin IP leakage. If an attacker has your real origin address, from an old DNS record, an SPF entry, a certificate transparency log or a misconfigured mail server, the traffic bypasses the scrubbing layer entirely and the only record is whatever your own edge kept, which is typically thin and rotated within days. The second is authoritative DNS sitting outside the protection contract, which happens more often than vendors admit. Knock out name resolution and the site is unreachable without a single packet touching the protected perimeter, and your provider’s report will show a quiet day.

On the reporting side: file with Action Fraud and keep the reference number, since it is what insurers and police forces both ask for. Escalate to the National Crime Agency where the incident affects critical services or has national impact. Notify the ICO only where personal data is implicated; a pure availability incident with no data involvement usually is not reportable, though the seventy-two hour clock under UK GDPR is unforgiving if it turns out to be. Internally, record who handled what and when, keep the original files rather than screenshots of them, and cost the downtime properly while the numbers are still retrievable. If you run an online shop, fold this into your first-hour incident playbook rather than treating it as paperwork for later.

UK penalties in international context

In the United States, DDoS offences run under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, 18 U.S.C. §1030. Federal sentences for booter operators have included custodial terms, supervised release with computer monitoring conditions, and restitution orders tied to documented victim losses. Restitution is worth noting, because it rewards exactly the kind of detailed loss quantification that also drives harm findings in an English court.

Australia’s Criminal Code Act 1995 sets a maximum of ten years for unauthorised impairment of electronic communication. Canada charges mischief in relation to computer data under section 430 of the Criminal Code, also with a ten-year indictable maximum. Across the EU, Directive 2013/40/EU on attacks against information systems requires member states to set maximums of at least two years, rising for botnet-enabled attacks and attacks on critical infrastructure. NIS2, the 2022 network and information security directive, is sometimes cited here but it regulates operators rather than punishing attackers; it imposes security duties and administrative fines on the organisations being attacked, which is a different instrument entirely.

The common thread across all of them is that maximums are high and prosecutions are comparatively few. Which leads to the one position worth holding firmly: legal deterrence has no place in a defence business case. Rented capacity, overseas infrastructure and mutual legal assistance timelines mean the prospect of prosecution protects nobody’s revenue on the day. What protects it is scrubbing capacity, time-to-mitigate, closed origin leakage and DNS inside the contract. Understanding UK DDoS attack penalties and how a sentence is actually reached is useful for setting expectations, for briefing the board, and for knowing what evidence to keep. It is not a control.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the maximum sentence for a DDoS attack in the UK?

Section 3 of the Computer Misuse Act 1990 carries up to ten years on indictment for unauthorised acts impairing the operation of a computer. Section 3ZA, added by the Serious Crime Act 2015, raises that to fourteen years, or life imprisonment where the attack causes or risks serious damage to human welfare or national security. Actual sentences for individual offenders are usually far below these ceilings.

Is using a booter or stresser service a criminal offence?

Yes. Making, supplying or offering to supply an article for use in a Computer Misuse Act offence, or obtaining one with a view to its supply, is an offence under section 3A, with a two-year maximum on indictment, and launching the attacks themselves engages section 3. Paying a subscription to a stresser panel leaves a payment record and an account record, which is how law enforcement has identified customers after booter site takedowns.

Do first-time offenders go to prison for a DDoS attack?

Often not. Youth, an early guilty plea attracting credit of up to one third, no previous convictions, cooperation and supported neurodevelopmental assessments frequently combine to produce a suspended sentence or a community order with unpaid work. Immediate custody becomes much more likely where the defendant sold attacks, targeted healthcare or emergency services, or attached a ransom demand.

Can I sue the attacker or claim compensation after a DDoS attack?

In principle yes, but it is rarely worth it. Compensation orders in criminal proceedings are limited by the defendant’s means, and civil claims require an identified, solvent defendant within a practical jurisdiction. For most UK businesses, insurance recovery and contractual remedies against providers matter more, and both depend on the same downtime evidence a prosecution would need.

What evidence do UK police need before they will charge someone over a DDoS attack?

The CPS applies the Full Code Test, so there must be a realistic prospect of conviction on the available evidence. In practice that means second-level timestamps, source and vector data, mitigation records, proof of impact on your systems, and a witness who can attest to all of it. Any ransom demand should be preserved verbatim with full headers, since it is frequently the strongest single item in the file.



Legal Action After a DDOS Attack: A UK Playbook

Legal Action After a DDOS Attack: A UK Playbook

When a flood of junk traffic takes a UK company offline for six hours on a trading day, the questions arrive in a familiar order: what is happening, when does it stop, who did this, and can we do anything about it afterwards. Legal action after a DDoS attack is usually the last of those to be asked and the first to be quietly dropped. Not because the attack was lawful. It plainly was not. The problem is that by the time anyone asks the question properly, the flow records that would have supported a claim have already rotated out of a buffer, and the only surviving artefact is a screenshot of a dashboard with no timezone on it.

This piece is written from the target’s side of the incident. It covers what UK law actually offers a victim, what to preserve in the first day, who to notify, how ransom demands change the calculation, and why the contract you signed with your mitigation provider usually determines your legal position far more than the Computer Misuse Act does.

What UK law says about a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on your business

Three provisions matter. Section 3 of the Computer Misuse Act 1990 covers unauthorised acts with intent to impair the operation of a computer, which is the standard charge for knocking a service offline; it carries up to 10 years’ imprisonment on indictment. Section 3A covers making, supplying or obtaining articles for use in such offences, and it is the provision that catches booter and stresser services and the people who buy them, with a maximum of two years. Section 3ZA, inserted by the Serious Crime Act 2015, covers unauthorised acts causing or creating a significant risk of serious damage, and carries up to 14 years, rising to life where the damage touches human welfare or national security.

So the sentencing range is real. What it is not is a remedy. A conviction, when one happens, arrives months or years later, usually against a teenager who bought 30 minutes of attack traffic for the price of a takeaway, and it returns nothing to your balance sheet. UK courts can make compensation orders, but they are limited by what the defendant can actually pay, and booter customers are rarely solvent.

Criminal offence, civil wrong, contract breach: pick your fight

These are three separate tracks and they behave differently. A criminal prosecution is brought by the state, needs a suspect, and is not yours to control. A civil claim is yours to bring, but you must identify a defendant, serve them and enforce against assets. A contract claim is against a party you already know, usually your hosting, content delivery or scrubbing provider, and it is governed entirely by the words in the agreement you signed. Most organisations that talk about “taking legal action”are describing track one and end up, if anything happens at all, on track three.

Attribution, not illegality, is the obstacle

Nobody disputes that flooding a UK business is unlawful. The difficulty is naming who did it to the civil standard. Reflection and amplification attacks arrive from thousands of innocent third-party servers whose owners have no idea they are participating. Source addresses are routinely spoofed. Attack capacity is rented from a marketplace that takes cryptocurrency and hides behind its own proxy layer. As we have noted before, websites have long struggled to find meaningful legal recourse for denial of service attacks, and the reason is almost always evidential rather than doctrinal.

The first 24 hours: the evidence that keeps your options open

Everything below needs preserving before the next log rotation, not after the post-mortem meeting.

  • NetFlow, sFlow or IPFIX records from your edge routers, exported and copied off the collector;
  • Edge and origin web server access logs, plus firewall, load balancer and WAF counters for the attack window and for a comparable quiet period;
  • Monitoring and synthetic check alerts, status page updates, and the timestamps on each;
  • A full packet capture sample if one was taken, even a few seconds of it;
  • Internal records of who was notified, at what time, on which channel, and what decisions they took.

Log everything in UTC from NTP-synchronised systems. Mismatched clocks are the first thing an opponent challenges, and a two-minute drift between your load balancer and your provider’s scrubbing centre is enough to muddy a time-to-mitigate argument permanently.

Ask for the written attack report, not a screenshot

The single most useful document you will ever hold after an incident is your provider’s post-incident attack report: named vectors, peak bit rate and peak packet rate, source distribution by geography and autonomous system, and precise start and stop timestamps. If your traffic passes through a third-party proxy or scrubbing centre, that provider holds the only complete record of the flood. Your own logs show the hole, not the thing that made it.

Yet a great many contracts never promise that report. Make it a named deliverable with a delivery deadline before you sign, not a favour you request in week three while the account manager is on leave. The same applies to raw evidence requests: ask during procurement whose scrubbing capacity you are actually buying, because plenty of UK offerings are resold capacity on another operator’s network. Where that is the case, your SLA counterparty may have to go and ask an upstream party that has no contract with you at all. That chain is worth mapping alongside the rest of your vendor claim checks.

Ransom notes are exhibits

Keep the original email with full headers. Keep the chat transcript, the wallet address, the sample attack timing and any subsequent messages. Do not forward the note around the business and delete the original, which is what happens roughly every time, because a forwarded copy strips the headers that make it worth anything.

Who to report a DDoS attack to in the UK, and in what order

Start with Action Fraud, the reporting centre for fraud and cybercrime in England, Wales and Northern Ireland; in Scotland, report to Police Scotland on 101. What you get back is a crime reference number, and its value is administrative rather than investigative: insurers ask for it, regulators expect it, and customers asking awkward questions are reassured by it. Feeding into the National Crime Agency’s picture matters too, even when nobody investigates your individual case, because the pattern data is what supports booter takedowns.

The NCSC’s denial of service guidance is the sensible reference point for building a defensible response plan, and pointing to it in a board paper is more persuasive than an internal opinion.

Then work through the duties that carry deadlines:

  • NIS Regulations 2018: operators of essential services and relevant digital service providers have incident notification duties to their competent authority, and availability incidents count;
  • FCA operational resilience expectations: financial firms are expected to report operational incidents and to be able to show whether an important business service breached its impact tolerance;
  • UK GDPR: Article 32 treats availability as part of security, so loss of access to personal data can be a personal data breach, and Article 33 gives you 72 hours from becoming aware to assess and, where there is a risk to individuals, notify the ICO. Document the assessment even when you conclude no notification is needed;
  • Contractual notice clauses: customer and partner agreements often require notification within a small number of days, and those clauses bite long before any regulator does.

Ransom DDoS attack: what to do before anyone discusses paying

The reflex payment is the worst available option. It buys no guarantee the traffic stops, it marks you as a payer, and extortion groups have a documented habit of returning to previously compliant targets with a larger number. Before any of that, there are UK legal problems sitting behind the transaction.

Payments to a sanctioned person or entity breach financial sanctions, which carry strict civil liability and can attract monetary penalties from the Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation. Any payment also needs assessing against the money laundering offences in the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002. Screening the recipient is not optional diligence; it is the thing that determines whether the payment is lawful. Note also that in July 2022 the NCSC and the Information Commissioner wrote jointly to the Law Society making clear that paying does not reduce the risk to individuals, is not required by data protection law, and will not be treated by the ICO as a mitigating factor. Separately, the Home Office consulted in early 2025 on restricting ransom payments by public sector and critical national infrastructure bodies; check the current legal position before relying on anything written here.

Practical sequence: notify your insurer and broker before acting, because most cyber policies condition cover on prior consent and on using panel responders. Then follow a decision chain you wrote in advance, naming a director who owns the call, the lawyer who signs it off and the law enforcement contact who is told. Writing that chain during an attack, at 02:00, with the phones ringing, is how organisations make decisions they later cannot defend.

Suing the attacker versus claiming against your provider

Civil claims against attackers work in a narrow band of cases: identifiable commercial booter operations with reachable assets, domains or payment processors. Ubisoft’s 2021 action against a stresser operation is the usual illustration, reported as producing an award of just over $153,000 alongside site takedowns. The useful lesson is not the sum. It is that the defendant was a business with a website and a payment flow, not an anonymous customer. Against individual botnet users overseas, the cost of identification, service and enforcement will exceed anything you recover.

Claims against your hosting, CDN or scrubbing provider look more promising and usually deliver less than expected. SLA credits are typically a percentage of one month’s fee, claimable only inside a notice window of around 30 days, and sit beneath a liability cap tied to annual charges, with consequential loss excluded outright. Downtime, lost sales and reputational harm are exactly what those exclusions remove. Credits and damages are different animals; treating a credit as compensation is a category error that has cost boards a lot of wasted legal spend.

Which leaves insurance doing most of the real work. Business interruption and cyber policies commonly apply a waiting period measured in hours, so a four-hour outage may recover nothing while an eleven-hour one recovers a great deal. Loss adjusters want a defensible figure: hourly revenue derived from comparable trading periods, staff time at loaded cost, recovery and third-party response fees, and contractual penalties triggered by the outage.

Why the contract you signed decides how strong your position is

Four clauses do most of the damage, and they are all checkable before you buy.

What “managed”actually includes. Managed should mean onboarding and rule tuning records, a named escalation path, an engineer empowered to change policy during an attack without waiting for your sign-off, and a committed written attack report. Absent those, you have bought monitoring, not management.

When the clock starts. On-demand cover almost always measures time-to-mitigate from your notification, which turns your own out-of-band notification trail into evidence: timestamped emails from a mailbox that is not on the affected domain, call logs, ticket IDs. Teams forget this while firefighting. If you are weighing always-on against on-demand cover, understand that the difference is partly evidential, and read the small print on what those SLA seconds measure.

Three surfaces, not one. Network and transport, application layer, and authoritative DNS. The third is frequently outside the DDoS contract entirely, which means an outage at that layer can fall into nobody’s SLA while still being the reason customers saw an error page. Establish who covers authoritative DNS, under what commitment, and what report you receive if it fails.

Origin IP leakage. This is the claim-killer. A stale A record on an old subdomain, a mail host sharing the origin address, a staging environment nobody decommissioned: any of these lets the flood reach your origin directly, outside the protected path. When that happens the provider will say so in writing, correctly, and the SLA never applied. Origin leakage, rather than raw attack volume, is the most common reason a proxy gets bypassed and the most common reason a claim against the vendor collapses. Audit your DNS zone for it while things are calm.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is a DDoS attack a criminal offence in the UK?

Yes. Section 3 of the Computer Misuse Act 1990 covers unauthorised acts intended to impair the operation of a computer, with a maximum of 10 years on indictment. Buying or supplying a booter or stresser service falls under section 3A, and section 3ZA covers attacks causing serious damage, carrying up to 14 years or life in the most severe cases.

Can you sue someone for a DDoS attack?

You can, provided you can identify and serve a defendant with assets worth pursuing. Civil action has succeeded against commercial booter operators, as in Ubisoft’s 2021 case reported at just over $153,000 plus takedowns. Against anonymous or overseas individuals, the cost of attribution and enforcement generally outweighs anything recoverable.

Who should you report a DDoS attack to in the UK?

Report to Action Fraud for a crime reference number, or to Police Scotland on 101 if you are in Scotland. Then work through sector duties: NIS Regulations notification if you are an operator of essential services or a relevant digital service provider, FCA reporting for financial firms, and an Article 33 assessment for the ICO where personal data availability was affected.

Does a DDoS attack have to be reported to the ICO?

Not automatically, but it can be reportable. UK GDPR Article 32 treats availability as part of security, so if people lost access to personal data and there is a risk to their rights and freedoms, Article 33 requires notification within 72 hours of becoming aware. Record the assessment and its reasoning even where you decide notification is not required.

Should you pay a ransom DDoS demand?

Paying is the weakest option and carries its own legal exposure, including financial sanctions liability and the money laundering offences in the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002. It guarantees nothing and marks you as a payer. Notify your insurer and law enforcement first, and make the decision through a chain you agreed in writing before the attack rather than during it.



Botnet for Hire DDOS: What Defenders Should Do

A four minute outage on a Tuesday morning, an email quoting a cryptocurrency address, and a screenshot of a control panel with a countdown timer on it: for most mid-sized UK firms, that is what a botnet for hire DDoS attack looks like from the inside. It looks nothing like the terabit-per-second records that fill vendor datasheets. The attack is short, it is bought by the minute, and it is aimed at whichever part of the estate nobody bought protection for. Booters and stressers, the subscription websites that sell distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) capacity to anyone with a payment method, have turned what used to be a specialist capability into a consumer product with a pricing page.

What follows maps what the hire market realistically delivers against the three surfaces that need defending, and what a UK protection contract has to say in writing before it is worth signing.

What the DDoS-for-hire market actually sells today

The product is a subscription, not a hit. Buyers pay monthly for a tier that caps attack duration (often measured in minutes rather than hours), limits how many attacks can run concurrently, and unlocks particular attack methods on the higher plans. The National Crime Agency has repeatedly described these services as cheap and requiring almost no technical skill, which is why the volume of nuisance attacks against small and mid-sized targets stays stubbornly high. Cost is not the constraint. Duration is.

The firepower behind the panel has also changed. Classic Windows PC botnets have largely given way to compromised Internet of Things devices (routers, cameras, digital video recorders), hijacked cloud instances bought with stolen cards, open reflectors on the public internet, and rented residential proxy pools that route requests through real consumer broadband lines. That last category matters more than the raw node count, and the mitigation section below explains why.

The “stress testing”framing on these sites is a fig leaf. A legitimate load-testing service verifies domain ownership, requires written authorisation from the asset owner, and agrees a test window. Booters do none of that. You type in a hostname or IP address and press start.

Enforcement has changed the market without ending it. Operation PowerOFF, the international campaign run with Europol, the FBI and the NCA, has seized booter domains in successive waves since 2018, and in March 2023 the NCA disclosed that it had been running its own fake DDoS-for-hire sites to collect data on the people signing up. Takedowns compress supply for a while; new panels appear under new branding. What has genuinely shifted is buyer risk, because the paper trail now sometimes leads back through law enforcement infrastructure.

Four attack profiles a rented botnet actually delivers

Short volumetric bursts

Because the subscription pays for duration, the typical hired attack is a burst sized to fit the slot: a few minutes of packets-per-second aimed at your uplink, sometimes repeated on a loop through the working day. Against this profile, peak scrubbing capacity on a datasheet is close to irrelevant. If detection plus diversion takes fifteen minutes and the attack lasts five, the traffic has stopped before mitigation engaged, and you still took the outage, still fielded the customer complaints, and still have nothing useful in the incident report. Time-to-mitigate, with a defined clock start, is the number that decides the outcome.

Reflection and amplification

Reflection borrows other people’s bandwidth. The attacker spoofs your address and queries open services on the internet, which then send far larger replies to you. CISA’s alert TA14-017 on UDP-based amplification attacks lists indicative bandwidth amplification factors including roughly 556 times for Network Time Protocol (NTP) and up to 51,000 times for memcached, alongside Domain Name System (DNS) and Connection-less Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (CLDAP) vectors. The 1.35 Tbps memcached flood against GitHub in February 2018, documented publicly by Akamai, came from a modest number of reflectors. The practical consequence for a mid-sized firm is unpleasant: the botnet does not need to be large to saturate a 1 Gbps or 10 Gbps uplink.

HTTP floods through residential proxies

Layer 7 attacks skip the pipe and go for the expensive parts of the application: internal site search, cart and checkout, login, password reset, and any API endpoint that hits the database on every call. Delivered through residential proxy pools, the requests arrive from real UK consumer IP addresses with clean reputation scores. Blocklists and ASN filtering do very little here. A modest rate of well-shaped requests against a search endpoint can take down an origin that would shrug off a far larger volume of static page requests.

Authoritative DNS floods

The fourth profile is the one that keeps working, because it is the one nobody bought protection for. Instead of attacking the website, the attacker floods the authoritative nameservers that answer queries for your domain. Resolve nothing, reach nothing: web, mail, VPN, API, all of it.

Which surfaces a hired botnet finds first

Network and transport. Ask your transit provider what it will absorb before your uplink saturates, and what it does when the flood exceeds that. Some will null-route your prefix to protect their own network, which achieves the attacker’s goal for them at no extra charge.

Application layer. A proxy tuned for volumetric traffic and a proxy tuned for bot behaviour are different products, sometimes from the same vendor at different price points. Absorbing 200 Gbps of UDP says nothing about whether the platform can separate a residential-proxy request flood from genuine Black Friday demand.

Authoritative DNS. This is the most common gap in UK estates: the web front end sits behind a paid proxy while authoritative DNS stays on the registrar’s free tier, unmonitored and unmentioned in the mitigation contract. A rented botnet pointed at those nameservers takes the whole estate offline without ever touching the protected site. Proper DNS DDoS attack protection means anycast authoritative service with query-rate controls, spread across more than one provider if the domain earns revenue, and it needs to be a named line item in the contract rather than an assumption.

Origin IP leakage. Proxy bypass is far more often a leak than a breakthrough. Historical DNS records in passive DNS databases, certificate transparency logs listing every subdomain you have ever issued a certificate for, outbound mail headers advertising the origin, and forgotten staging, webmail or cPanel hostnames all publish the address the proxy is meant to hide. Rotating the origin IP after onboarding and locking the origin firewall to the proxy’s published ranges costs an afternoon. Buying more capacity to compensate costs a great deal more and does not fix the hole.

Matching mitigation to the threat

Reverse proxy. Fastest to deploy, strongest at layer 7, and the right answer for HTTP floods. Worthless if the origin address is public and the origin firewall accepts traffic from anywhere.

BGP scrubbing. Diverts whole IP ranges, covers non-HTTP services such as SMTP, game protocols, VPN concentrators and RDP gateways, and is the only sensible model if you run your own address space. The trade-offs are route convergence time, the return path (GRE tunnel or dedicated link) and the fact that on-demand diversion has to be triggered before it does anything.

Hosting-level or transit filtering. Read the small print. Plenty of firms sold as a DDoS protected hosting provider include basic layer 3 and 4 filtering at the edge with everything meaningful, layer 7 rules, tuning, per-incident reporting, priced as an upsell. Ask for the mitigation capacity figure at the point of presence serving UK traffic, not the global aggregate.

On the always-on versus on-demand question, short bursts settle it. Detection plus diversion on an on-demand service frequently outlasts the attack, which is the whole argument for keeping traffic on-path permanently for revenue-generating assets. The trade-offs, latency, cost and change control, are set out in more detail in this comparison of always-on and on-demand protection models, and the SLA wording that decides when the clock starts is picked apart in this guide to what time-to-mitigate seconds really mean.

Extortion, hacktivism and the note that arrives with the traffic

The ransom DDoS pattern has been stable for years: a short demonstration burst against a production asset, an email naming a deadline and a cryptocurrency wallet, and a threat of something far larger if the deadline passes. Sometimes the demonstration is impressive. Often it is a few minutes of reflection traffic bought from a booter panel, which tells you the sender’s budget runs to a subscription rather than a serious campaign.

Read the demonstration attack as evidence. Vector, duration, sustained bit rate and packet rate from your provider’s incident report are a better guide to real capability than anything in the note itself. A three minute NTP reflection burst and a promise of 2 Tbps do not belong to the same actor.

Paying is the wrong move for reasons that have nothing to do with principle. Payment confirms a working email address, a solvent victim and a decision-maker who folds, which is exactly the profile that gets resold. Preserve the note with full headers, report to Action Fraud (serious incidents get escalated to the NCA), and tell your mitigation provider immediately so they can raise thresholds before the deadline. On communications, publish a status page acknowledging degraded service and nothing about which vendor is mitigating, which thresholds tripped or what the traffic is doing. The first hour of decisions is covered in more depth in this playbook for an ecommerce site under attack.

The UK legal position for buyers, sellers and victims

Two provisions of the Computer Misuse Act 1990 do the work. Section 3 covers unauthorised acts intended to impair the operation of a computer, which is what a DDoS attack is. Section 3A covers making, supplying or obtaining articles for use in such offences, and it is the provision that reaches booter operators and, in some cases, their customers.

Buying an attack is an offence even if the buyer never touches the target. Payments leave records, panels keep logs, and seized infrastructure has produced customer lists more than once. Prosecutions of the people behind botnets do happen, as in the case of the Florida man charged over a botnet attack on Akamai, though attribution more often stalls at spoofed source addresses, bulletproof hosting and jurisdictions that do not answer requests.

Victims should log the mitigation provider’s attack report with vector breakdown and timestamps, netflow or sampled traffic from the edge, application logs showing failed transactions, and a defensible estimate of lost revenue. Do that before assuming anyone will be arrested, because the evidence file has value for insurance and for the contract review regardless.

Buying protection that holds up: what to ask before you sign

Most UK contracts in this space are resale to some degree, which is not automatically a problem. Not knowing is the problem. Three questions separate a real service from a reseller dashboard:

  • Whose scrubbing network sits behind the invoice, and what is the contracted capacity at the point of presence serving UK traffic?
  • During an attack, does escalation reach an engineer at the underlying network operator, or does it stop at a first-line desk that raises a ticket?
  • Is a named human empowered to change policy at 03:00 without your sign-off? If not, you have bought monitoring, not management.

“Managed”should mean onboarding and initial rule tuning, traffic baselining before the first incident, alerting to named contacts, out-of-hours cover with a defined response target, a written escalation matrix and a per-incident attack report afterwards. Ask for a time-to-mitigate SLA with the clock start defined in the contract, and rehearse the failover at least once with the provider on the call. Typical structures and price bands are broken down in this guide to managed DDoS protection in the UK.

Build the business case on the real threat model, not a hypothetical record breaker. Work it through with your own figures: a retailer turning over £40,000 an hour at peak would, on a straight pro-rata basis, lose in the region of £2,700 for every four minute burst that lands in the wrong window. Four of those a year, plus the support cost and the customers who bounce to a competitor, is the number to put next to the annual protection fee. Short repeated outages are what the hire market delivers, and they are what the budget line has to be justified against.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does a botnet for hire DDoS attack actually cost the attacker?

Booter and stresser plans are sold as low-cost monthly subscriptions with tiered attack duration limits and concurrent attack slots, rather than per-attack pricing. The NCA has consistently described these services as cheap and requiring little technical skill. The practical point for defenders is that the cost of launching a nuisance attack is trivially low compared with the cost of absorbing one.

Is buying a DDoS-for-hire or booter service illegal in the UK?

Yes. Section 3 of the Computer Misuse Act 1990 covers unauthorised acts intended to impair the operation of a computer, and section 3A covers obtaining or supplying articles for use in such offences. Paying someone else to run the attack does not put a buyer outside the Act, and the NCA’s March 2023 disclosure that it ran fake booter sites shows enforcement is aimed at customers as well as operators.

Can a rented botnet get past Cloudflare or another reverse proxy?

Usually by going around it rather than through it. Origin IP addresses leak through historical DNS records, certificate transparency logs, outbound mail headers and forgotten staging or webmail subdomains, and traffic sent straight to the origin never meets the proxy. Rotate the origin address after onboarding and restrict the origin firewall to the proxy’s published IP ranges.

Should we pay a ransom DDoS demand?

No. Payment identifies you as a target that pays and tends to invite repeat demands, sometimes from different actors. Preserve the note with full headers, report it to Action Fraud, notify your mitigation provider so they can tighten thresholds before the stated deadline, and treat the demonstration burst as evidence of what the sender can actually do.

How do we tell a hired-botnet attack from a traffic spike or a bad crawler?

Genuine demand and legitimate crawlers follow the shape of your site: varied paths, referrers, session progression and a plausible geographic mix. A hired layer 7 flood concentrates on a small number of expensive endpoints, shows near-identical request timing and header patterns, and produces no conversions or downstream page views. Baselining traffic before an incident is what makes that comparison possible on the day.



Cloudflare partners with Booz Allen Hamilton to guide organizations under attack

Cloudflare announced a collaboration with Booz Allen Hamilton to support enterprises under attack by providing expedited Under Attack as a Service (UAaaS) with 30-Day Rapid Response DDoS Mitigation, including continuous monitoring and protection. Under this new agreement, Booz Allen’s Global Commercial clients facing a cyber-attack will be connected to Cloudflare for immediate Incident Response. Now, Booz Allen clients that may fall victim to cyber-attacks have a fast track to support when they need it most. … More ? The post Cloudflare partners with Booz Allen Hamilton to guide organizations under attack appeared first on Help Net Security .

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Cloudflare partners with Booz Allen Hamilton to guide organizations under attack

Fastly Bot Management protects websites, apps, and valuable data from malicious automated traffic

Fastly introduced Fastly Bot Management to help organizations combat automated “bot” attacks at the edge and significantly reduce the risk of fraud, DDoS attacks, account takeovers, and other online abuse. Fastly Bot Management represents an important cybersecurity milestone for the company, building on its proven bot mitigation expertise and capabilities currently available in its Next-Gen WAF. “Organizations increasingly are delivering more enhanced digital experiences to their users at the edge. Not surprisingly, cyber adversaries have … More ? The post Fastly Bot Management protects websites, apps, and valuable data from malicious automated traffic appeared first on Help Net Security .

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Fastly Bot Management protects websites, apps, and valuable data from malicious automated traffic

CISA: Here’s how you can foil DDoS attacks

In light of the rise of “DDoS hacktivism” and the recent DDoS attacks aimed at disrupting French and Alabama government websites, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has updated its guidance of how governmental entities (but also other organizations) should respond to this type of attacks. DDoS attacks explained First and foremost, the document explains the main difference between a DoS attack (from a single source) and a DDoS attack (from multiple sources). “The … More ? The post CISA: Here’s how you can foil DDoS attacks appeared first on Help Net Security .

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FBI v the bots: Feds urge denial-of-service defense after critical infrastructure alert

You better watch out, you better not cry, better not pout, they’re telling you why The US government has recommended a series of steps that critical infrastructure operators should take to prevent distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.…

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FBI v the bots: Feds urge denial-of-service defense after critical infrastructure alert

Feds dismantle Russian GRU botnet built on 1,000-plus home, small biz routers

Beijing, now Moscow.… Who else is hiding in broadband gateways? The US government today said it disrupted a botnet that Russia’s GRU military intelligence unit used for phishing expeditions, spying, credential harvesting, and data theft against American and foreign governments and other strategic targets.…

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Feds dismantle Russian GRU botnet built on 1,000-plus home, small biz routers