Its much easier to use cloudflare, but sometimes it just not possible to use them (it wasnt for us, due to needing hardcoded IPs in our DC)
In DDoS attacks you have three models: On-Prem: Buy hardware and big fat internet pipes to filter traffic (expensive / time \ resrouce intensive) Hybrid: On-Prem devices that can mitigate X/Mbps and then starts announcing your routes after X to their cloud scrubbing centers which can filter it at a much higher capacity (best option) Cloud: Full on filtering by a provider where all your traffic goes through their scrubbing centers full time (usually adds latency, extremely expensive)
The hybrid model is the best and what most companies are going to as it allows you to filter smaller attacks out with little cost as well as scaling up to large 100 Gb/s+ attacks without having to buy massive amounts of hardware/transit.
Also, due to caching of assets in PoPs close to end-users (and TLS termination at the edge), the site is often much faster than without DDoS protection.
Additionally as is mentioned in the article - If the attacker knows your public IP address they can easily bypass CloudFlare by simply directing the traffic to you and not CF.
Always-on scrubbing will typically run you $10k provisioning and $6-9k monthly for 100mbps of clean bandwidth from most of the providers.
If you only care about HTTP/HTTPS traffic, you can get very solid DDoS protection at cheap prices. We use and love the Sucuri ( https://sucuri.net ) which starts at $9.99 per month.
Some friends have good success with Incapsula and CloudFlare, but they get a bit more expensive to get full protection ($60 per month on http://Incapsula.com ).
All 3 can cover 99.9% of the people that doesn't expose SMTP/POP/FTP/DNS and other services.
If you run these yourself, BlackLotus.com and Arbor Cloud are a great help, but their prices start at 5 digits per month.
http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/blog.fastmail.com/2015/12...
Not sure if it's due to DDOS, but it's definitely not working on my end.
Honestly, I think the ease in which people can be anonymous is major problem here. Anyone with an internet connection can buy botnet time with Bitcoin and accept a ransom in the same way. It makes it incredibly difficult to follow the path back to the attacker.
At this point pretty much the only thing you can do is collect data and share it with CERT and other relevant law enforcement. I don't have a good sense of how effective they can be, but it makes sense that the more data they have, the better chance they have at identifying specific botnets and follow the path back to the owners.
