Cybercrime’s Low Barrier to Entry

Every year, threat actors have more options. When even NSA hacking tools are being offered for sale to anybody who wants them, the situation can’t get much worse.

Then again, maybe it can.

Last year’s DDoS assault on Dyn hit an extraordinary 1.2 terabits per second. Since Dyn is a DNS provider, this attack affected the availability of many major Internet sites.

You might think that the largest DDoS attack in history, which took out large swathes of the Internet for hours, was difficult to execute.

Not so.

According to a report in Security Week, this unprecedented attack was done by a single “relatively unsophisticated attacker” — a disgruntled gamer who wanted to take the PlayStation network offline.

Nor was it costly to execute. According to a report in Forbes, the gamer paid a mere $7,500 for the attack.

Today, all that is needed to launch a massive cyberattack is a few thousand dollars and a bad attitude.

Photo credit: PeteLinforth