Kitz Forum
Chat => Tech Chat => Topic started by: Bowdon on October 04, 2020, 06:09:10 PM
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I was thinking earlier today (uh oh!), as we move to faster internet connection speeds will ddos'ing become a thing of the past?
I remember being on the IRC (Internet Relay Chat) program and I would be an Op (Operator, like a Moderator) for some channels. Every so often we would get a disgruntled person join the channel, cause trouble and end up getting kicked/banned from the channel. Some of them would come back and try to cause havoc in the channel, including filling the channel with pre-typed lines of text and also directing an attack on the OP's. Back in the ADSL days a few people targetting one person could disconnect them from at least the IRC server and sometimes knock a person offline. But as connections became faster knocking someone offline became more difficult because the connection has much more headroom when it comes to data transmittion. I'm not sure of the exact year date but those types of attack on IRC completely stopped.
As we gradually move over to FTTP/DOCSIS 3.1 connections I've noticed some people say that websites still limit download speeds so we will only rarely be able to max out our fast connections. So that tells me that the ability to launch a ddos attack will temporarily be more easily done as connections become faster, more available, and cheaper.
But what happens when the actual website hosts update their hosting connections to become equal to, or faster, than our current FTTP/DOCSIS 3.1 speeds? Will it become more difficult to take a website down as they will have more headroom to take the incoming data than they do now, like what happened to us as individuals when we moved from ADSL to FTTC connections. Or do you think the threat of the DDOS will still be around causing problems at the same levels it is today?
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I’m not at all sure, but somehow I suspect that DDOS attacks will still be effective sometimes if the number of attackers is sufficiently high, also each attacker may have access to significant upstream bandwidth which will make it more effective. There have been some amazingly high loads in some DDOS attacks in the last couple of years. It all depends on so very many variables, an obvious one being the size of the pipe or pipes that is/are being attacked, but that’s not all. My instinct based on not much at all, is that things won’t change too much.
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Surely faster Internet speeds will make it worse, as the size of the pipe at the data centre relative to the user will be much smaller.
So while it may be harder to kill an end user, and end user used in an attack on a data centre may be far more problematic.
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Risks of DDoS and its impact won't change. If anything it'll be worse as symmetrical connections are more common.
Remember: the rest of the infrastructure scales alongside the end users. Hitting a 1 Gb connection with 100 x 20 Mbit has a similar effect to hitting a 100 Mb connection with 100 x 2 Mbit streams.