Tracking a booter service across four rebrands

tracking a booter service across four rebrands sounds like a narrow topic. It turns out to touch almost every part of how an edge network behaves under attack.

The numbers

Across the last quarter, 71% of challenged clients never attempted a solution, 24% solved one challenge and then behaved normally, and 5% solved challenges repeatedly while continuing to attack — the last group is where analysts spend their time.

Median added latency for legitimate visitors that were challenged was 280 ms on desktop and 410 ms on mid-range Android devices.

The economics behind it

A booter service rents out a 100 Gbps attack for less than the price of a pizza. Defending against it with bandwidth alone is a race you lose. Defending against it by making each malicious request cost more than it earns is a race you win.

This is the entire idea behind never metering attack traffic: our costs scale with filtering, not with your invoice.

What we got wrong

Our first version challenged too eagerly on mobile networks, where thousands of real users share a handful of carrier-grade NAT addresses. Reputation that is shared is reputation that is noisy.

We now weight fingerprint consistency and session behaviour far more heavily than IP reputation for traffic from known mobile carrier ranges.

What actually happens during a flood

The first thing to fail during a layer 7 flood is almost never bandwidth. It is connection slots, worker processes or database connections on the origin — resources measured in hundreds or thousands, not gigabits. An attacker who can make each request expensive only needs a few thousand requests per second.

That is why we score requests before they are proxied. By the time a request reaches your origin, it has been attributed to a client, compared against that client’s history and weighed against the current load on the route it targets.

Lessons for your own runbook

Know who can change DNS at two in the morning. Know your origin IPs and who can rotate them. Know which routes are expensive, and have a rate limit ready for each of them.

Most outages during attacks are not caused by the attack itself but by rushed changes made while under pressure.

Compliance is a side effect

Regulators increasingly ask for evidence of resilience, not just promises. An incident timeline with start, peak, vectors and impact is exactly the evidence DORA and NIS2 ask for — and it falls out of good observability for free.

We export incident reports in formats auditors can file without anyone rewriting them.

Challenges beat blocks

Blocking lists go stale within minutes when attackers rotate through residential proxies. Proof-of-work does not care where a request comes from; it only cares whether the client is willing to pay the cost.

For a real browser that cost is a few hundred milliseconds, once per session. For a botnet sending a million requests a minute it is a million puzzles a minute — and at that point the attack stops being cheap.

If you run into any of this in your own environment, our SOC is happy to take a look — even if you are not a customer.