Re:
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Warning: this is likely going to be a long essay, but I think it gives some perspective on the topic.
The short version is:
I was talking to Joi about this the other day - I wouldn't pay too much attention to this, Schneier has a long tradition of dramatizing and misunderstanding things.
That said, buying cloudflare (it's private) or akamai stock might be an idea because DDos attacks are not going away soon and as a trend they will likely increase.
Longer version:
So back to the Schneier, If you listen to the podcast he links (which you shouldn't cause it's a waste of time) he doesn't give any numbers.
Also to provide some perspective, he links to this: https://www.verisign.com/assets/report-ddos-trends- Q22016.pdf
If you look at the numbers on page 9 they are an order of magnitude smaller than the attack on a, rather unknown to the general public, cyber security journalist: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/09/krebsonsecurity-hit-with- record-ddos/
And we are talking average not median..
CloudFlare was able to absorb most of the attack on Krebs' website and they probably brought the website down because he wouldn't be able to pay for the service at that rate anyway. So those numbers there are nowhere close to "probing" the limits as he suggests..
The more interesting aspect is that DDos attacks boil down to two strategies:
I) "Amplication" attacks - which is a text book example of the tragedy of the commons
- Force real traffic to happen. This often happens when you compromise a device (that's what a botnet does). In that sense IoT is particularly dangerous
(1) Is a good argument for Danny's idea of building a backup Internet. The problem there is that a lot of protocols (DNS, NTP etc etc) have design flaws in that you can generate asymmetric amounts of traffic and force the traffic to go to some other destination. (eg: https://www.us-cert.govincas/alerts/TA 13-088A)
In a lot of cases people leave around the intemet vulnerable servers and those are used for these types of attacks (hence the tragedy of the common).
(2) Is a much harder problem to solve and to a large extent it wouldn't go away even if we had a different intemet.
And (2) is interesting because you don't necessarily need to compromise the target if you have control of the network infrastructure. For instance, China attacked GitHub by injecting JavaScript into people's navigation session (http://www.netresec.corrinpage=Blog&month=2015-03&post—China%27s-Man-on-the-Side-Attack-on-GitHub). The Javascript code would then reach out to GitHub and DDos the website.
Computer Science problem aside, (2) is problematic because it leads people to think that things like this: hup://www.skatingonstilts.com/skating-on-stilts/spiking-the-great-cannon.html are a good idea.. These poor man's attempts at "sanctions" are not a solution, neither from a diplomatic/political POV nor from a technical one in my opinion.
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