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Comment by gist | Hacker News Reader

> publishes these marketing articles

What's funny is that it's obvious to anyone who would received an email like this is that it's spam to be ignored. What makes an email like this any more believable than anything you get unsolicited by email making any claims or demand? The fact that it is mentioning DDOS instead Nigerian money? I am surprised that cloudflare feels the need to even write this up and the fact they they take it seriously is only mitigated by the marketing angle (which makes them smart instead of naive I guess).

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Well, these mails are almost an exact copy of the ones the real armada collective sent out last year though? It would make sense to be wary of them if you heard about attacks carried out by them.

The question is, what should a small enterprise without protection against ddos do? Of course it's wiser to actually implement said protection, but it's a lot easier for the human mind to jump to the short-term and easy solution.

Well now if you were going to pull a scheme like that for real (and not just spray and pray 10,000 sites hoping a few would pay) wouldn't it makes sense to give the site at least a taste of what you can do for a short period of time? And do you honestly think that it's good business practice when receiving an email like that to just assume it's truthful and you need to swing into some kind of fire drill? I don't.

No, I never said I thought it was good business practice. But I'm saying it's not good business practice to ignore it. If you can afford to ignore it, then there's no issue, but there's plenty of sites that don't have protection against this, and have money on the line if they get taken down.

The cost of paying off (a semi-probable) attack, might be better than going down the next day, and having to firefight it.

I'm playing the devil's advocate here. I would not pay x thousand dollars because of an email from said group, but I can understand it slightly better than sending money for nigerian scams.

$100,000 in bitcoin would belie the "obvious to anyone". People don't understand what a DDoS really is, nor how to fix it, so the email becomes much more ominous than a Nigerian 419 scam.

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