[lolinder]

Right. So why does the fact that they targeted 34,500 ports show it was a well-engineered attack? By itself it's just evidence that they know how to iterate over ports. Coupled with the data size (7.3Tbps) we know they had an enormous botnet. None of this points to a well-engineered attack, it just means that lousy IoT has made botnets incredibly cheap.

A well-engineered attack would not draw headlines for its scale because it would take down its target without breaking any records.

[motorest]

> A well-engineered attack would not draw headlines for its scale because it would take down its target without breaking any records.

You don't hear much about DDoS that are either comparable in size or bring down targets. How do you explain why this one made the news in spite of not having met your arbitrary and personal bar?

[lolinder]

Like I said: it broke records for data throughput. It doesn't hurt that Cloudflare has an interest in publicizing the size of the DDoS attacks it fights off.

> in spite of not having met your arbitrary and personal bar?

I'm not sure what you mean by this. I didn't establish any sort of bar for what sorts of DDoS should get headlines, I'm just agreeing with OP that that line in the article doesn't make any sense. There may be other reasons to believe this attack was well-engineered but the article doesn't get into them.

[therealpygon]

Yep. The number of ports is a useless metric to indicate sophistication of an attack. It’s like saying someone is a genius because they can write the numbers 1 through 10 on a sheet of paper, which is about the equivalent complexity.