It might do that, but it won't make very much difference. Who brings down sites: a couple of people with LOIC or hundreds of people with LOIC and a handful with actual substantial botnets under their control.
Most criminals are not using services like Luminati - they are using actual botnets made up of compromised computers. In that case, their bandwidth costs are far cheaper than yours.
Why don't botnet operators use a peer-to-peer style command centers? According to the original article on the FireEye blog, the network was taken down with only "three days of effort."
That's a game of whack a mole, and even if you whack them down, the devices are already out there and are going to stay online for years.
The only thing that will make a dent at the problem quickly, is wholesale filtering of all Internet traffic by all network providers originating from the IP addresses identified for being part of these botnets.
Sounds like a really great way to potentially destroy someone's career if they aren't terribly competent and you are. Infect some component in their home network that they don't even know is smart-enabled, and keep breaching their new devices, adding them to an active and conspicuous botnet. The only recourse for average Joe is to find expert help, which isn't really in abundant supply if you are a semi-sophisticated malicious actor.
I don't even want to think about the ramifications for small and medium sized businesses. Realistically, how much would it cost to be able to completely destroy a local competitor by paying someone to orchestrate a few events in succession.
That may be true, but is THIS an illegal botnet? What makes LOIC illegal? What makes a determined, coordinated request from thousands of volunteer computers illegal? I liken this to a civil disobedience sit in.
I'm not sure how that would help the problem. When you're talking about thousands or more devices, counterattacking them individually wouldn't be feasible.
Also I imagine many botnet owners secure the devices they take over so that others can't steal them for their own botnet.
Back in the olden days of IRC, there was times when entire regions of the internet were taken offline resulting from a ddos for personal vendettas. For exactly that reason too - they attack the weakest link and often it isn't the host directly.
In this case - it really could be anything. The cost of one of these attacks is next to zero. Rarely will the botnet owner lose any machines resulting from an attack. The unfortunate thing after one of these attacks is you have no way of preventing it or going after the source.
I've never used this, and it's incredibly shady considering the users probably do not realize that their Hola browser plugin does this, but Hola runs a paid VPN service where you can get thousands of low-bandwidth connections on unique residential IP addresses, provided generously through their "free" VPN users.... It's essentially a legitimate attempt at running a botnet as a service.
When MasterCard does millions of dollars a day worth of online transactions, which can be halted by LOIC, then yes, blame them.
LOIC is really, really basic, and anon has never really gathered any respectable amount of bandwidth. Most small botnets put them to shame.
What I suspect, however, is that actual botherders are using these raids as cover. They can still DDoS the target, but 4chan takes the blame. The recent addition of "hivemind" functionality to LOIC, which slaves the user's computer to an irc feed that controls targeting and firing, seems like the perfect opportunity for a botherder to set their botnet to take orders from same.
Holy crap that's expensive. I'm not sure if it's scalable though. At that price I would be surprised if the botnets used mostly for sending spam doesn't just query google for whatever result and "click" the +1.
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