Attack of AltCoin Pools - DDOS

[hdmediaservices]

So perhaps this has been discussed before -- maybe not.

I know in the past there has always been a Bitcoin pool that was being DDOS'd.  So yeah it was an inconvenience to that particular pool's members, but it never really made an impact on the general mining of the coin, people would automatically switch to one of a dozen or more pools.

Well - use this same attack on a major pool that has 2/3 the hashing of say 42 coin.  Knock them down for a day and the difficulty drops considerably and the attacked can then mine the coin quickly on their own.  I mean there aren't that many pools that mine 42 coin in any significant hash - but a couple.

I believe this is now happening with Alt-Coins.  I haven't looked at the statistics to confirm, but someone is definitely trying to manipulate the difficulty of some coins for their personal gain using DDOS attacks.

Several pools have been taken down (for more than a few hours) in the past week, so something is up.

If you think about it -- why would this not work?

If I want to mine a lot of 42 coin -- well just take down one or two pools (that mine the majority of it) for a day or two or just hours.  The difficulty will reset in a matter of minutes.  Less people mining a coin means a lower difficulty and a chance to mine more of the coin.

I don't know how much a DDOS attack can cost -- but I would think it isn't too expensive.

In addition - good DDOS protection for these alt coin pools might be pricey (in the whole scheme of things) or perhaps not even enabled.  I wouldn't be surprised if some of these pools are being hosted at someone's house. 

Am I missing something here?  I hope so!  Curious what others think...

[princesocapuyo]

There's many reasons someone would DDOS a mining pool, but what you say makes sense.
Now if the coin is at least a little popular a DDOS attack wouldn't be that big of a deal. You tell the owner to fix it or protect their pool, if they don't you leave and search for another one.
DDosing isn't really expensive at all, I could DDOS a moba game match from my computer in a few minutes. The thing about DDOS attacks is that they're hard to deal with. Most pool owners won't bother to invest in defenses against them. As you said, it's too expensive.

I don't really know a whole bunch about mining so I can't really give more informed opinion, but you basically hit the needle already anyways.

[miningspree]

alt coin pools have been battling DDoS since the beginning, its not uncommon for rival pools to DDoS eachother, especially during a popular launch.

[hdmediaservices]

Curious -- so looking at just Alt-Coins -- and not LTC -- what would you consider to be "rival pools?"

I've been mining Altcoins for about 4 months now on one particular and popular pool -- and this is the first time I've seen the attacks happen.

[djm34]

Curious -- so looking at just Alt-Coins -- and not LTC -- what would you consider to be "rival pools?"

I've been mining Altcoins for about 4 months now on one particular and popular pool -- and this is the first time I've seen the attacks happen.

this time is definitely over... I remember at maxcoin launch that the 2 pools (1gh and ypool) were getting ddos in turn, now nobody really care about ddos'ing a pool of the coin.
Also most pool have some protection implemented already.
And there isn't much coin worth ddosing, it works only for coin successful at launch (meaning small number of pools) and I haven't anything lately which be good enough to worth the effort.
At the moment coins which are popular (and worth ddosing) have too many pool and ddosing wouldn't give any advantage, and those which have too little pools (good candidate for ddosing) are in most case shitcoins nobody want. so no more ddos...
(and big and serious pool have all protections against ddos attack...)