As DDoS attacks become front-page news, one botnet master says the security industry is ten steps behind. DDoS, or distributed denial of service, cyber-attacks became front-page news in March when an attack dubbed the ' largest cyber-attack in history ' hit an anti-spam organisation. The attack saw Spamhaus servers flooded with billion bits of data per second, which is around three times the size of the largest attack seen previously.

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While an attack of this size has so far been a one-off there are hundreds if not thousands of people around the globe who are making millions of pounds every year by hiring out the networks of zombie computers known as botnets which carry out these attacks.

The hacker said it amazed him he was able to make as much money as the average monthly industrial wage in a few hours typing on a laptop while watching TV.

We found out how much money hackers actually make - Business Insider

In recent years hacking has become much more accessible with the automation of tools allowing even those with limited technical knowledge to make money. At one stage the anonymous hacker said he was making "millions" every year from a variety of hacking techniques, including carrying out DDoS attacks on behalf of customers. DDoS attacks are typically carried out by networks of PCs which have been infected with malware and can then be centrally controlled to send huge volumes of traffic towards a particular website or server, knocking the services offline for a period of time.

These botnets are rented out for as short as 30 minutes at a time, with those renting them typically blackmailing their targets by threatening to keep their businesses offline unless they pay up. Hackers manual + money making a system which clearly works, but as one major European gaming company told IBTimes UK exclusively this week, there are ways to prevent this type of attack without having to pay out to blackmailers. Speaking on the basis of anonymity the head of security for the gaming company which specialises in live casino games, spoke about a persistent series of DDoS attacks which threatened the company and its customers just over a year ago.

The attacks took place at that specific time as the attackers knew the normal security team would not money maker download ludacris working and it would be easier to bring down the company's servers.

The attackers were not known, and most likely rented a botnet to carry out the attack, making it virtually impossible to trace their real identity. The head of security speculated that it could have been a rival company who carried out the hackers manual + money making or a customer seeking revenge having lost a lot of money on one of the sites supported by this company.

The company was able to mitigate the attacks using DDoS mitigation techniques which are able to divert the huge volume of traffic targeting the site. While employing this security measure is not free, the anonymous botnet master told Hansen he was amazed more online companies didn't use it:.

Attacks the size of the Spamhaus attack are atypical however and according to research published by Arbor Networks the size of these volumetric type of DDoS attack is plateauing, though not because of technical restrictions. When asked for the reason we have not seen more attacks like the one which hit Spamhaus in March, Darren Anstee from Arbor is stumped: The capability to generate larger attacks has been out there for quite a long time. If you look at Spamhaus the attack vector that was used was nothing new, they just leveraged the capabilities that were already out there on the internet.

The reason we are not seeing bigger attacks on the scale of Spamhaus is that attackers simply don't have to boost their attacks for them to work:. Grenfell Tower survivors will be rehoused in luxury Kensington flats.

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