A new form of cybercrime has emerged – the use of IP booter or stresser services. These allow technically unsophisticated individuals to overwhelm websites and servers through distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks for as little as $10. Victims of these services have included businesses, gamers, government institutions, and even emergency services. The attacks take websites offline for hours or even days by flooding them with more traffic than handle.
What are ip booter panels?
IP booter panels, also known as stressers, are web-based services that provide users with the tools to execute DDoS attacks against internet addresses of their choice. They work by enlisting the resources of a network of compromised devices, known as a botnet, which then overwhelm targets with fake traffic. For as little as $10, without needing any technical skills, anyone pay to access these panels and point them at a target. Some panels boast access to botnets with 100,000 devices or more, enabling devastating bandwidth-based flood attacks. Other common DDoS methods booter panels offer include UDP floods, ICMP floods, SYN floods, VoIP floods, and amplification attacks. These disable networks by exhausting resources like firewalls, load balancers, and application servers.
Threat landscape
The booter panel business has consolidated, with many smaller players disappearing from the market. At the same time, the largest remaining panels now maintain botnets with well over 100,000 devices. This has led to an escalation in both the scale and frequency of attacks from booter services. In late 2018, researchers identified DDoS campaigns where short bursts of traffic exceeded 500 Gbps. Other attacks persist for days at a time.
The motive is usually personal – top targets include gaming platforms and individual gamers competing for prize money or streaming an audience on platforms like Twitch. Extortion has also become increasingly common, with business owners pressured into paying a ransom to make attacks stop. However, victims do also include random websites with no particular significance to attackers – often used simply to test booter panel access. Unfortunately, the amateur nature of these users makes attacks unpredictable, indiscriminate, and difficult to prevent.
Basic protective steps
Carefully manage any servers
Servers accessible directly from the public internet are highly vulnerable to attacks – don’t expose them unless necessary. Use VPN tunnels so they only are accessed by your internal network. Restrict traffic through firewall policies to prevent discovery by attackers.
Work with your host and isp
What Is an IP Stresser? If your website is hosted externally or reliant on ISP links for connectivity, ensure agreements are in place for DDoS mitigation and traffic scrubbing. This uses network intelligence to filter out malicious traffic before it hits your infrastructure.
Implement ssl encryption
Websites and applications secured with SSL encryption tend to be less affected by basic bandwidth-type flood attacks. The encryption handshake requires greater computing resources from attacking botnets.
Harden dns infrastructure
Protect DNS servers with firewall rules, ensure DNS traffic is encrypted, and use private hostnames internally to make your network less visible.
Utilize proxy and waf protections
Deploy proxy servers and web application firewalls (WAF) to inspect traffic and isolate your infrastructure. Rules block traffic from suspicious locations while allowing genuine users through.
Carefully evaluate any cdn
Content deliveries networks (CDN) cache and serve website content to prevent overwhelm. However, some basic CDNs magnify the impact of large-volume attacks. Evaluate options carefully to ensure effectiveness against different DDoS methods.
