EVERYTHING about Booters (and CloudFlare)

Thu Jul 28 14:41:47 UTC 2016

I'm sorry, but this entire discussion is predicated on half-truths and
nonsense spewing out of the CF team.  It's a shame too, as they're
usually great community minded folks who are well respected around
here.

No matter how you define the CloudFlare service, that they can claim
ignorance due to "common carrier" passthrough is preposterous,
especially given their purported knowledge of what's going on.
Likewise if the booter sites were connected to any other CDN,
WAF/proxy, public cloud provider, etc.  Call it what you want, but at
the end of the day, they're providing connectivity and keeping the
storefront online.  Want the problem stopped?  Easy, stop it at the
source by denying them service.  Every service provider (or its
upstream at some point) has an AUP which prevents the service from
being used for illegal purposes.  Telling NANOG members that they
don't understand the nature of the CF service, and that they should
somehow get a pass, is dishonest.

That they're keeping these criminals online at the requirement of the
FBI?  Anyone who's actually worked with law enforcement can tell you
that the first rule of fight club is to NOT talk about it, especially
if you're under gag order.  A more likely story is they're just doing
this for the attention, and basking in it, kind of like a certain blog
post suggesting they pioneered the practice of configuring hosts with
LACP for throughput and HA.

If Justin/Matthew/Martin/etc. are listening, I implore you to do the
right thing and stop providing service to criminals.  Full stop,
without caving in to your very talented marketing department.  And to
everyone else, I'd ask you to do what you think is right, and treat
CloudFlare's anycasted IP blocks as you would any other network
harboring criminal activity and security risk to the detriment of your
customers.   (Is Team CYMRU listening?)  Much like the original spam
problem in the 90s, the collateral damage might be annoying at first,
but the end will justify the means.

Drive Slow (like a souped up Supra),
Paul Wall

On Wed, Jul 27, 2016 at 10:48 PM, Randy Bush <randy at psg.com> wrote:
>> They just lost all respect from here. Would someone from USA please
>> report these guys to the feds? What they are doing is outright
>> criminal.
>
> hyperbole.  it is not criminal.  you just don't happen to like it.