>The Aisuru DDoS botnet operates as a DDoS-for-hire service with restricted clientele; operators have reportedly implemented preventive measures to avoid attacking governmental, law enforcement, military, and other national security properties. Most observed Aisuru attacks to date appear to be related to online gaming.
https://www.netscout.com/blog/asert/asert-threat-summary-ais...
So why? Like why would someone pay to take a game down? I see this all over reddit with different games but I just don't get the point. What's the benefit of taking down an online game for a couple of hours.
The other half comes from sever operators ddosing their competition. There is a lot of money to be made from paid cosmetics, ranks, moderator (demi-tyrant) status, etc on custom servers.
Final Fantasy XIV keeps getting hammered, likely Aisuru, off and on since at least September.
https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/news/detail/6b56814...
Are you mentioning the minecraft community by your message or any other gaming communities too
Anyone have any idea how much a 15 Tbps DDoS attack would cost?
Thousands of dollars? Tens of thousands?
I'd imagine the pricing is quite disconnected from the price of "legitimate" bandwidth. But I don't know in what direction.
For other games, maybe trying to interrupt some time limited event or tournament. Going all the way down the rabbit hole, if you're not already familiar take a look at how crazy things get in a game like EVE: Online.
Then of course there are the bored trolls and/or people who feel wronged by the game's developers or other players.
Taking a competitor offline for a few hours is a lot of money in a market business I expect.
there seems to be lot of weird stuff going on with gaming casinos the recent CoffeeZilla episode comes to mind, so wouldn’t be surprised if botnets are used
well, gaming and Krebs's blog: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/05/krebsonsecurity-hit-with...
https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/application-services/produc...
Not saying that's the case in this particular incident though.
Most of the time crime groups are running extortion campaigns, amplification campaigns, etc. For example, if a competitor can benefit from them being down you may be able to sell that. Eventually we will probably see the invention of crowd-funded randsomware, where everyone must submit one verification can of crypto to unlock the hacked game servers.
That's enough to explain it. But if you wanted to go more full shadowy conspiracy theory, someone arranged for a protection service that just so happens to work by giving some entity cleartext surveillance over much of the internet. Perhaps as a response to HTTPS everywhere being annoying.
I'm not suggesting that's the situation, but that it's the kind of possibility to keep in mind, intellectually, and it would be consistent with history.
They weren't targeting Azure itself, per se, but some service which was hosted on Azure.
The IP address in question wasn't mentioned, so we're left to speculate what this was about.
If it's going to cost me about the same in terms of resources to target you and a bunch of other people colocated with you, it's a bit less obvious who launched it and why.
lul wut?
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-white-house-ballroom-d...
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/09/microsoft-contributes-1-mill...
Its just toxic behavior.
Cloudflare scrubs Aisuru botnet from top domains list - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45857836 - Nov 2025 (34 comments)
Aisuru botnet shifts from DDoS to residential proxies - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45741357 - Oct 2025 (59 comments)
DDoS Botnet Aisuru Blankets US ISPs in Record DDoS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45574393 - Oct 2025 (142 comments)
This is scary. Everyone lauds open source projects like OpenWRT but... who is watching their servers?
I imagine you can't run an army of security people on donations and a shoestring budget. Does OpenWRT use digital signing to mitigate this?
The build infrastructure is, of course, a juicy target: infect the artifact after building but before signing, and pwn millions of boxes before this is detected.
This is why bit-perfect reproducible builds are so important. OpenWRT in particular have that: https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-developer/security#reproducib...
That's not always the silver bullet you seem to think it is. Have you ever tried to build something like Chromium, Firefox, or LLVM yourself? It's not realistic to do that on a mid tier let alone low end device.
Even when you go to the trouble of getting a local build set up, more often than not the build system immediately attempts to download opaque binary blobs of uncertain provenance. Try building some common pieces of software in a network isolated environment and you will likely be surprised at how poorly it goes.
If projects actually took this stuff seriously then you'd be able to bootstrap from a sectorlisp and pure human readable source code without any binary blobs or network access involved. Instead we have the abomination that is npm.
https://buildd.debian.org/status/package.php?p=firefox-esr
See Bootstrappable Builds for starting from almost nothing, so far only GNU Guix and StageX have worked out how to start from the BB work to get a full distro. Should be fairly trivial for other distros too if they cared.
https://bootstrappable.org/ https://guix.gnu.org/blog/2023/the-full-source-bootstrap-bui... https://stagex.tools/
I do see the Tor-Issue - a botnet or a well-supplied malicious actor could just flood it. And if you flip it - if you'd need agreement about the build output, it could also be poisoned with enough nodes to prevent releases for a critical security issue. I agree, I don't solve all supply chain issues in one comment :)
But that in turn could be helped with reputation. Maybe a node needs to supply 6 months of perfect builds - for testing as well - to become eligible. Which would be defeated by patience, but what isn't? It'd just have to be more annoying to breach the distributed build infrastructure than to plant a malicious developer.
This combination of reproducible, deterministic builds, tests across a number of probably-trustworthy sources is quite interesting, as it allows very heavy decentralization. I could just run an old laptop or two here to support. And then come compromise hundreds of these all across the world.
I have yet to experience a straight shot install or build of anything in an air gapped environment. Always need to hack things to make it work.
It really wouldn't. You don't even need a powerful build server since you can mirror whatever someone else built. You can also buy / hack nodes of existing trusted people.
> run an army of security people
Do you think these private companies do this? They don't. They pay as little as humanly possible to cover their ass.
Botnets comprised of compromised routers is common and commercial/consumer routers are a far juicer target than openwrt.
They probably spend more on the team who ends up writing the "We take your security very seriously" breach notification message than they do on "security people". At least until then get forced into brand-name external Cyber Security Consultants to "investigate" their breach and work out who they can plausibly blame it on that's not part of the C suite.
It’s probably helpful that open source teams aren’t hampered by standards and 20 year outdated audit processes either.
Didn't they have a vulnerability in their firmware download tool like a minute ago?
The difference between OpenWRT and Linux distros is the amount of testing and visibility. OpenWRT is loaded on to residential devices and forgotten about, it doesn't have professional sysadmins babysitting it 24/7.
Remember the xz backdoor was only discovered because some autist at Microsoft noticed a microsecond difference in performance testing.
Is it "scary" to think about OpenWRT potentially getting hacked? If you get scared by theoretical possibilities in software, sure. Is it relevant? Not exactly. Are companies' official servers more secure than an open-source project's servers? In this case, apparently not.
Meanwhile, corporations are driven entirely by profit motive, so as long as it's more expensive to be vigilant about security than it is to be lax about it they will never improve.
Until companies which produce (and do not update) vulnerable equipment are penalized (e.g. charged with criminal negligence) for DDoS attacks using their hardware then the open-source projects are going to continue to be far more trustworthy and less vulnerable than corporations which mass-produce the cheapest hardware they can and then designating it as obsolete and unsupported as fast as possible to force more updates.
Plenty of stories of fairly major projects having evil commits snuck in that remain for months.
https://medium.com/@aleksamajkic/fake-sms-how-deep-does-the-...
https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2994
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/linux/malicious-packag...
https://www.cnx-software.com/2021/04/22/phd-students-willful...
I could go on but I trust this is a sufficient number of examples.
Also, if you actually read it, there are exceptions for open source software!
(please prove me wrong, Alex)
Mistakes can be made during reconfigurations but you'd have to catch those while the issue is still live. Sounds like an advanced threat actor and not the run of the mill ransomware people (not that they're necessarily unsophisticated, but why'd they bother with these odds when there's low-hanging fruit to reliably exploit)
This is just a crazy thought, tangential to what are happening during an attack.
https://trends.builtwith.com/websitelist/Microsoft-Azure
Plenty of crappy websites on the list too.
Until then... There's gonna be a bigger wave.
If the vendor can't even secure their update server; how long do you think it would be until some RCE on these 100k un-patchable routers gets exploited?
The only people to blame for this is the vendor, and they failed on multiple levels here. It's not hard to sign a firmware, or even just fetch checksums from a different site than you serve the files from...
the fallout is some companies losing their revenue: https://status.neoprotect.net/ and other headaches for people all over the world
relevant law here: EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA).
While it doesn't make it mandatory, it does require patching devices in a timely fasion which in other terms: requires forced updates - pushing updated firmware is not enough if you read between the lines.
Even stronger requirements come into effect at the end of 2027.
You'd also need to have every country not actively involved in these types of schemes yet we know some governments are directly benefiting from the scams/theft their citizens are perpetrating.
You'd also need to have every country think the things you want to police against are wrong. Again, we know that's just not true.
I'd say a putative UN NetWatch would suffer from the same issues of funding and corruption and politics, but still we might have something better than this wild west lawlessness.
Careful what you wish for. Before you know it you can't have an IP without your ID.
They've never been expected to "stamp out" those things, any more than a city police department is expected to stamp out all crime and doctors are expected to stamp out all illness. Their mission is to reduce those things:
For warfare, they have been extremely successful relative to human history. War has actually become taboo and illegal, and very few happen. Look at history before the UN - it's a miracle. Think of the vision and confidence of people who, looking at 10,000 years of human history, immediately after two world wars, thought it was even possible, came up with effective strategy, did the hard work, and accomplished it.
I don't know the details of the other fields.
> I'd say a putative UN NetWatch would suffer from the same issues of funding and corruption and politics, but still we might have something better than this wild west lawlessness.
Politics and funding, and corruption, come with every human institution over a certain size, and especially with governments which can't exclude undesireable people: Democratic governments are the least corrupt, but if the people elect a corrupt representative or executive, then nobody can kick them out (unless they commit prosecutable crimes). And now imagine an association or confederation of governments, which is what the UN is.
So yes, the goal is to make something better. Otherwise, we might as well quit on everything.
But who will suppress attempts to go beyond the blackwall then?
Law enforcement takes time. The perpetrators of these attacks aren't hanging out in the open with their full names shielded only by the hope that their country won't extradite for political favor.
By the time the perpetrators are identified and a case is built, getting them charged isn't bottlenecked on the lack of an international agency. Any international law enforcement agency would be beholden to each country's own political wills and ideals, meaning any "teeth" they had would be no more effective than what we currenly have for extraditing people or cooperating with foreign police organizations.
They have a fundamentally different government and social model, basically a one person dictatorship that feels the need to micromanage and control their populace.
They absolutely love seeing democracy and businesses associated with it fail because it reinforces their perspective of the CCP model being superior and thus strengthens their perceived legitimacy (or even inevitability) of CCP control over China.
Some sort of international clearing house for ISPs to help identify and sequester compromised customers might be nice, too; but that doesn't need law enforcement powers; and maybe it already exists?
But here we are in 2025 still running IPv4 with CGNAT, so we can't.
CGNATs reuse IPs so any IP block rule fairly quickly becomes somebody else's IP that you shouldn't be blocking.
If, however, you use IPv6, you don't need CGNAT and, while addresses may change, a blocked address won't suddenly get recycled to an unsuspecting user. In addition, if the allocation is static, you can block the whole network range and the problematic devices can't change their allocation sufficiently to escape the IP block.
but these bad actors are not possible to track down in the first place since internet is unfortunately decentralized and things as simple as transactions submitted to bitcoin or etherium blockchain can be used as c&c
Literally the same as economic sanctions. The internet is a network of peers “trading” bits and bytes after all.
North Korea doesn't care if you limit their internet they already allow people to go outside their own.
Just not enough economic or political incentive to pay for it.
Borders currently get in the way but we needn't have law enforcement on foreign soil to solve that. Exchanging information and reliably acting upon it could be all these agencies need to do in their respective countries. When this proves effective aside from crime states that have no interest in upholding even their own laws (since dual illegality would probably be a prerequisite for any of this), they may eventually find themselves increasingly cut off and distrusted until they, too, cooperate or self-isolate like NK
For a few reasons (political, economical) there’s little will to enact them, these attacks are so few and far between and you can pay your way out of them in most cases, so the incentives aren’t there for ISPs (whom are a commodity judged primarily on price and bandwidth)
You detect the behaviour downstream and send a signal to the ISP that there is traffic that needs to he rate limited.
One mechanism for this is called RTBH (Remote Triggered BlackHole) which relies on community tagged prefixes of addresses exceeding rate limited to be blackholed from forwarding traffic further in to the internet.
There’s also things like flowspec but a lot of things rely on proper trust between ASNs.
But as the sibling mentioned, even with spoofing, you can still follow the packet trail from your border routers upstream. I think the main thing we are lacking is just responsibility on the ISP side, if someone reaches out complaining that half of your customers are sending ddos attacks, maybe you need to do something about it. Most of these huge attacks are compromised routers or IoT devices (remember Mirai Botnet?).
When I was running servers that would routinely attract DDoSed at ~ 10 Gbps, I ended up always running a low sample rate packet capture. Anytime I noticed a DDoS, I could go and look at the packets. If you've got connectivity to sink and measure 15 Tbps of DDoS, you can probably influence your providers to take some sampled packet captures and look at them too.
Even without clear information from packet captures, 15 Tbps is going to make an impact on traffic graphs, and you can figure out sources from those, although it might be a bit tricky because the attack duration was reported at only 40 seconds, so if someone only has hourly stats, it might be too small to be noticed; but once a minute stats are pretty common.
There's layer upon layer of relays now, and meshed C2C networks.
Lots of DNS fastflux too
Tangential: once I was targeted by a pretty primitive scam. More than 10 years ago (after someone I love was naive and inexperienced, having a medium amount stolen in a sensitive and stressful time of this person's life). I recognised fast and having time and will I sarted to play along, pretending I bite the bait. Collecting info while acting. In parallel trying to connect local and international authorities to report an ongoing scam effort. I believe I tried 4 organizations in 3 different countries apparently involved, I believe one was dedicated to online scams, also trying to warn Western Union, they are about to be used for scam. I even went personally to a police station locally to get some advice on how to assist catching the criminals. Since all I encountered insisted to report my damages, so they could start an investigation on an actual loss happened, I furiously gave up and decided whenever I will be having financial trouble I will invest my efforts in scamming others. No-one cares catching those in act! So the thugs can be incredibly bold and dumb, like the one I encountered, it is no effort doing better.
edit: grammar
That's the trick. A lot of countries bill calls to cell phones at 10 cents a minute; in the US, calling is near zero cost. The US makes a great market for scammers to target because of low operating costs, penetration of globally usable payment cards, minimal language diversity.
Of course, these scams are forbidden by law, but that doesn't change the economics. Very few scam shops get busted; especially when most of them run from outside the US. STIR/SHAKEN helps a bit, but not much... without a effective mechanism to report unwanted calls that leads to those callers being ejected from the network as well as ejecting providers that are unresponsive to reports, there's not really hope of progress.
Proxy Error
The proxy server received an invalid response from an upstream server.
The proxy server could not handle the request
Reason: Error reading from remote serverWho is this for? Is there anyone reading the article that can't grasp what a terrabit is but can somehow conceptualise one million 4k videos streaming simultaneously? I don't think anyone sits in that venn diagram.
Non-tech savy users know how live streams crash with sports like with Netflix recently during boxing etc or on Twitter last year and usually those come with some n Million users in kind of headlines or the like, so they have some reference to that scale.
As analogies go, there are worse examples. BleepingComputer is hardly the New Yorker or Atlantic, best we can hope for these days is a human is writing the article I suppose.
The best, meaningful comparison I've read is from Bill Bryson in A Short History of Nearly Everything. In it, he notes that there are 1M seconds in 11 days but 1B seconds takes 32 years.
There is a big (opportunity) cost to this kind of thing, How is this worthwhile for anyone? I assume that its's not just a competitor. Is it really worth <insert evil country>'s time to temporarily upset one of of three big cloud providers? Is there a ransom behind the scenes?
It would really help to understand why attack one endpoint with "the largest DDoS attack ever observed in the cloud". If it was important, it would be redundant in its CDN. Who paid for this attack and what did they gain?
The idea of DDoS for hire is to bury your own tracks in as much network requests as possible, so that the other side is overwhelmed processing (or even storing) that dataset and won't find out what the real target was.
That's literally the strategy of APT28/29.
Thankfully, it was almost always targetted at our www servers, which were not important for our service. Very occasionally, we'd get hit on the machines that we actually ran our service on, but between the consistent DDoS on www, and our own self-inflicted DDoS from defects in the client code we wrote for our users, our service was well prepared... if the DDoS went over line rate for the server, our hosting provider would null route it [1], but otherwise, we could manage line rate of udp reflection or tcp syn floods and what have you. From what I could tell, most attackers didn't retarget to our other servers when one got null routed.
[1] They did try a DDoS scrubbing service, but having our servers behind the scrubber was way worse than just null routing. Maybe the scrubbing could have been tuned, but as it was, it was better for us to just have the attacked servers lose connectivity to the public network.
is what I'll call bugs from now
IoT botnet. Just read that again, we're literally inventing problems where none needs to exist.
IoT adds basically null or negative value, except to nerds who like to think they're smarter than other people by consuming the latest e-slop.
Its all so tiresome.
Only way is to secure your IoT devices/routers/cameras/etc.
It would be better to get the regulation set up before stronger gatekeepers are created
What's the point of this? Are they continuously running DDoS somewhere and 40 second is what the buyer paid for?
The Microsoft article reads like a corporate press release. The original link contained additional pertinent information and research which is good for discussion.
The principles here are clear: we prefer the best third-party article to corporate press releases*, but at the same time we don't want blogspam (i.e. ripoffs that don't add anything interesting).
* https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
At the moment, that's what Cloudflare is doing. They're just not obvious enough, leading to people on forums (and here) asking "why do I constantly need to fill out captchas to enter websites".
You gotta draw the line in the sand somewhere, VPNs are already morally dubious, but if you ban the most shady of VPNs, residential proxies, then you can at least guarantee service providers the right to deny service to proxy users, while allowing proxy users to use the proxy everwhere they are welcome in.
on a more serious note, it's just not really possible since most residential proxy sites are botnets :)