Booters (they call themselves “stressers”) are websites selling extremely cheap DDoS attacks, mainly to the online gaming community who want to cheat at their shoot-em-ups by disrupting the opposition. The booters are also used, but far less often, for extortion, to disrupt school websites on the eve of a test, or just because someone doesn’t like you. This talk presents some of our (published) research into who runs booters and why. It then discusses the FBI intervention last December when 15 booter domain names were seized and discusses what we have seen since both in terms of the number of DDoS attacks per day and how the whole activity is now being viewed by those who are involved.
Dr. Richard Clayton is the Director of the Cambridge Cybercrime Centre, based in the Computer Laboratory of the University of Cambridge. He is a software developer by trade – his software house produced operating systems and word processors used by millions in the 1980s. In 2000 Richard returned to Cambridge to study for a PhD and he has stayed on as an academic because “it is more fun than working”. He spends much of his time studying ecrime – and regularly comes to Luxembourg to talk about novel topics in this research area.
The SRM seminars are the joint seminars of the Security and Trust of Software Systems and Applied Security and Information Assurance research groups, supported by the Laboratory of Algorithmics, Cryptology and Security and the Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust.