Quote from: flix on April 18, 2013, 07:24:15 AM

Almost every major Bitcoin website has been under DDOS attack over the past few days. Its becoming a real problem, not just for the exchanges. It is also opening up other vulnerabilities.

Installing defensive tech (like cloudflare) is not enough. Isnt the Bitcoin community supposed to include some of the best hackers in the world? We should set up a bounty and take the fight to whatever botnets are trying to mess with Bitcoin.

As long as attackers can get away with it for free, attacks will continue. Let's just readjust their incentives a bit Wink

I suggest setting up:

0. Reward for proving that there is a real attacker
1. Reward for whoever can identify the source of the attacks
2. Bounty for taking down (with prejudice) any major attackers

Considering the potential losses for major Bitcoin businesses if these attacks continue, Im sure pledging a few coins each for this would be worthwhile. It might also be a good project for the Bitcoin Foundation...

DDOS could come from anywhere about a month ago there were DDOS attacks on Czech internet banking sites, biggest search engine seznam.cz and some institutions sites. It lasted a FULL WEEK! Now the investigation come to results that those DDOSs comes from NORTH KOREA! Now tell me how you can find who is behind attacks and how do you (legaly) fight with Chinese or North Korea governmet, or Russin botnet operators with contacts to mafia. Hell, I can even imagine that this could be the work of CIA or some other shady organisation.

Fight fire with fire is not the answer, we can only make more exchanges so the attackers cannot DDOS them all. Or just use local/face2face exchanges.

Also if I remember it correctly the Gox is using Prolexic as an DDOS protection and it is used also by big banks around the globe. How is that possible that DDOSers were so succesful? Did the mass histeria and crowds trying to connect to Gox help them?