Bitcoin Forum

whoever is behind these on the various pools I use, I hate you :)

however I am somewhat curious as to the details and mechanics

ie how much difference does it actually make - I presume there is a real financial benefit or people wouldn't do it. Does it actually effect the pool or just the website reporting stats?

also who is behind most DDOS attacks - are they individuals or is it big mining groups trying to dominate?

just curious...

Some of them are from competitors, like if you use this one with low mining profit or unstable as the result of DDOS, as the end-miner, you will change another one.

Some may from some geeks, just for fun.

If they manage to DDoS down a pool, another competitor would be able to get more blocks in a way, especially if a pool like BTC guild get ddosed down.

is it not possible to trace DDOS attacks in some way (I have no idea)

It is possible to trace the DDOS attacks, to an IP address. But the hacker can easily be using a vpn or tor to hide his real IP.

For DDoS (first D stands for distributed), hacker controls a huge amount of zombie computers and use them to flood the victim's site/network. It is easy to trace the incoming packets, but it is not easy to get to the hacker behind the zombie computers.

you can't trace reflection attacks.

you can trace botnet attacks, but only after you detect them


sidenote: the ddos people speak of is likely just the pool owners skimping on bandwidth. the amount of getwork requests sent out on top of the site activity just wears out most pool owners 100 mbit ports.

DDoS can also be part of a larger attack aimed at stealing data or otherwise compromising the site, which also bestows major benefits to competitors outside immediate financial gain, and could be done by a "non-competitor" - just an ordinary guy looking to steal money. "Competitors" don't necessarily have to be pool ops, either, but could also be industrial-scale miners. It could also simply be anti-cryptocoin folks who haven't figured out better ways of attacking the network. In a similar vein, a multi-pool DDoS could be part of a larger attack on the pools' cryptocoin of choice, possibly attempting to reduce costs of a 51% attack or similar.

thanks for the education guys :)