DDOS on Steemit: peeping into the future of cybercrime and Blockchain
Steemit.com has recently experienced DDOS attacks which knocked it offline for hours. In today's' report we will look at the future of the DDOS attacks in the rise of Blockchain powered apps.
According to @Klye, Steemit's content sharing servers have been receiving upto 150,000 requests per second, knocking it offline.
What is DDOS
A DDoS attack stands for Distributed Denial of Service which when a website receives huge multiple requests from several "distributed" sites.
It is the "distributed" nature of the DDOS attack which raises concerns and that is what we will look at in this post.
Why was Steemit attacked?
While there are no reason given for the attack yet, it could be for the dumbest reasons. On Steemit, strange things happen.
Users who are frustrated with Steemit for not earning enough could easily be motivated to do launch a DDOS attack against Steemit.
Recently, @NextGenCrypto had an issue with @Dan and decided to flag all posts with the "EOS" tag. The current situation could be something similar.
DDOS services can be bought for just $5 on Fiverr. While there is no evidence to support it, it should be no surprise if the current DDOS attack was masterminded by a frustrated Steemian.
We took a screenshot of what one frustrated Steemian did on Steemit.chat a few months ago. Here is a cut of it;
What does the future hold?
Attacks on Blockchain technology
In the future, DDOS attacks could increase and be used by Blockchain services against their rivals, especially when a new Blockchain powered service threatens to challenge their market dominance.
In the most absurd example, a new Steem client wanting to draw users could launch a DDOS attack to knock other clients offline so as to draw users to its client.
Yet, the worst is yet to come.
Blockchain powered DDOS attacks
The worse is case scenerio will be when we have Blockchain powered DDOS bots. Ethereum allows for the building of anonymous Decentralized Applications.
Any DDOS bot built on Ethereum or EOS will be:
- Decentralized
- Autonomous
- Anonymous
- Unstoppable
- Indestructible
Blockchain powered DDOS service renting
You may doubt that a DDOS bot service could exist, however the opposite is true. In the future, a DDOS bot renting service will thrive due to the following factors:
- Creators of Blockchain DApps are be anonymous
- Ethical hacker schools will need DDOS service for tutorials
- Centralized businesses will want to use DDOS to kill their Blockchain powered competitors
- Governments will want to use DDOS to kill Blockchain powered anarchist sites
- Cyberpunks will want to use DDOS to kill big-government sites
As long as there is a market willing to pay for these services, Blockchain powered DDOS bots will rise.
What do you think?
Cyber crime will continue to rise. I think blockchain is so new and starting to be worth more money so it'll continue to get hit. There's not super great security in blockchain world yet because of the infancy. It'll get there :)