Rent a DDoS botnet

Over recent weeks there has been a lot of interest in DDoS botnets – that is to say, rentable botnets that provide DDoS as a managed service. I’ve spoken to a number of people about how easy this is to do, and how practically anyone who happens to know how to use a popular Internet search engine can probably locate the sellers or the hacking message boards they hang around. Perhaps one of the finer points missing about the discussion of renting DDoS botnets pertains to the size.

A fairly typical rate for DDoS botnet rental hovers around the $200 for 10,000 bot agents per day. The rate per day is fairly flexible, and influenced by the actual size of the botnet that the bot master is trying to section off for DDoS services and where those hosts are physically situated. For example, some DDoS providers make a virtue of allocating bots that are located within a particular country and their average Internet bandwidth. Meanwhile, you’ll find providers at the other end of the spectrum offering DDoS services at substantially lower rates. For example, here’s a DDoS botnet for rent at the moment over at Ghost Market…

As you can see from above, this particular operator is offering a botnet of between 80k and 120k hosts capable of launching DDoS attacks of 10-100Gbps – which is more than enough to take out practically any popular site on the Internet. The price for this service? $200 per 24 hours – oh, and there’s a 3 minute try-before-you-buy.

By way of another example, the following screenshot is from another botnet master offering a 12k botnet for rent – for the price of $500 per month. Screenshots like this appear to be popular as a means of validating the sellers claims of the size of their botnets – despite the fact that all of this information can be trivially forged. Notice that only a handful of bots appear to be online and currently accessible? (this ties in to what I was saying the other day about counting botnets).

There are of course plenty of other operators that work this way – offering DDoS managed services – and there’s lots of competition amongst them. What’s perhaps most amusing about this botnet market to me is the fact that so few sellers have “good” reputations – and the message boards are rife with competitors throwing mud about the quality of the service or that the “seller” is actually just running a scam on newbie buyers.

I’d encourage readers to keep an eye on these kinds of hacking portals – just make sure you only access the sites from VM/sandboxed disposable hosts since many of the sites attempt to hack your Web browser. You’ll uncover lots of information about the mainstream botnet seller/renter market and, just as importantly, details about many of the newer or popular DIY botnet creation kits out there.

--Repost from blog.damballa.com.