DDoS Is The Neglected Cybercrime That's Getting Bigger. Let's Kill It Off
The Register, Wednesday, September 3rd, 2025
Don't worry, there's a twist at the end
Agatha Christie stuck a dagger in the notion that crime doesn't pay. With sales of between two and four billion books - fittingly, the exact number is a mystery - she built a career out of murder that out-bloodied Jack the Ripper. It's a fair bet that had she chosen to write about accountancy fraud instead, her sales would be between two and four billion fewer. Some crime is sexy. Some is not.
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) is a profoundly unsexy cybercrime, and that's a big problem. Headlines are full of ransomware, data breaches, or the latest exploit. DDoS, where a site or service is poleaxed by a packet tsunami, is just background noise. Now and again, security agencies put out a press release because they've taken down one of the botnets that propagate DDoS attacks, but that's been going on for decades without much effect.