Getting a hit man is expensive and dangerous, but if you just want to launch an attack on a website, it's cheap, around 10 dollars per hour.
LONDON: Getting a hit man is expensive and dangerous, but if you just want to launch an attack on a website, it's cheap, around 10 dollars per hour.
Krebs on Security reports that for a few hundred dollars you can go to an underground forum and hire someone (evidently Russian and Chinese) to mount a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on a site.
DDoS attacks usually rely on botnets, or networks of computers that run malicious software that fire off requests to a website.
The owners of those computers are almost never aware that they are part of an attack, Discovery News reports.
When enough page requests are sent, the receiving site's server gets overwhelmed and crashes, shutting the site down at least temporarily. Larger, more-trafficked sites will have better defenses, but a larger network of computers can take those down too.
Evidently, one can hire a hacker to mount a DDoS for about five to ten dollars per hour. Prices vary, but for about 1,200 dollars one can hire a DDoS attacker for a month.
A number of underground forums even sell botnet software for do-it-yourselfers. The authors of the software (known as Darkness) claim that with 20,000 bots in the network it can take down just about any site. Like many good software packages there's even a version available for free.