alt Hacker NewsOff topic, but why is a DoS something considered to act on, often by just shutting down the service altogether? That results in the same DoS just by the operator than due to congestion. Actually it's worse, because now the requests will never actually be responded rather then after some delay. Why is the default not to just don't do anything?
Replies
echoangle • yesterday at 11:25 AM
I think some people use hosting that is paid per request/load, so having crawlers make unwanted requests costs them money.
ImPostingOnHN • yesterday at 11:39 AM
*> Why is the default not to just don't do anything?
Because ingress and compute costs often increase with every request, to the point where AI bot requests rack up bills of hundreds or thousands of dollars more than the hobbyist operator was expecting to send.
It keeps the other projects hosted on the same server or network online. Blackhole routes are pushed upstream to the really big networks and they push them to their edge routers, so traffic to the affected IPs is dropped near the sender's ISP and doesn't cause network congestion.
DDoSers who really want to cause damage now target random IPs in the same network as their actual target. That way, it can't be blackholed without blackholing the entire hosting provider.