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> Who, with a lot of money, would want to hurt Linode's business in this way? This isn't just a "script kiddie" having fun. It's a very well planned and powerful attack requiring buying large botnet capacity for an extensive amount of time.

Serious question: how much is "a lot of money' in this case? How much does an attack like this cost?

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Unfortunately linode hasn't specified enough to give specifics about that.

From what they have said however, it seems to me like this is generally a very "smart" attack.

Unfortunately, a smart attack can be done much more cheaply in terms of botnet capacity than a dumb volumetric attack (this still combines a volumetric attack, but, in targeted ways).

I have delt with these kinds of attacks (defending them) and they are, unfortunately, much too cheap to pull off. Botnet capacity is dirt cheap, if you're willing to spend the time to find/compromise your own botnet hosts, its effectively free.

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