[Benjammer]

A DoS attack is, by literal definition, an attempt to overwhelm a host until it is forced to _deny service_ to valid user requests. Are there intrusion techniques that both bring down the server and break into it at the same time? I'm not a security expert, but that doesn't seem like it makes a whole lot of sense to me.

[vannevar]

Maybe in the milliseconds between packet swarms, or immediately before or after? Just seems like a lot of resources to pour into an attack that was defeated in a few minutes. To what end?

[w0rd-driven]

There's validity to the approach of sending packet swarms to cover intrusion attempts but the traffic levels were more than a small amount of cover. It is possible that it was designed as a smokescreen and someone's calculations were wildly incorrect. No one's safe from off by one errors :>

[vlan0]

I’d be willing to bet it was a “test”. Like what we saw with the mirai botnet against Kreb’s blog.