Quote Originally Posted by Rueby View Post
I've heard that DDoS attacks can be costly for the attacker as well, so it's not really sustainable for a long period I think. I think also the longer the attack goes the more Intrusion Protection Systems (IPS) start to kick in...I found it very interesting but I plan to research it further because my brain isn't wrinkly enough for this.
For ddos attacks the prices differ massively, and prices arent linear. The heavier the attack, the faster the price goes up. And especialy when they become very heavy, its exponential. The price betweeen the strongest attack and one at half of that is a diffirence of like 500x here. Maintaining large botnets is very expensive.

This is why IPS systems are problematic for ddos attacks long term. Initialy the ddos is cheaper than the defense, but once they scale up, pricing here is quite linear. As long as you can buy a server, you already require a ddos to be significantly stronger to compensate.

Also, if its detected which sources are known to be part, they can be blocked well ahead of the target. It only needs to pass through 1 of the datacenters that are part of a global system to avoid big ddos attacks, and suddenly your attack becomes crippled. And yes, large datacenters do these things because they otherwise would also risk hardware damage when a target is near one of their DCs.