> I've often wondered why people would conduct attacks if the attacks don't actually end up doing anything.
Here's one good reason: to test their tooling and botnet. If you've been hitting smaller targets and taking them offline reliably, you might not even max out the bandwidth of your botnet. You have to have something that can handle the traffic to measure how high you can go. Even if not, you might just want to continue testing. It's going to be important if you're selling DDOSes.
At one time we considered publishing real-time DDoS information but decided against it to stop people using us to test the power of their DDoS botnets.
Here's one good reason: to test their tooling and botnet. If you've been hitting smaller targets and taking them offline reliably, you might not even max out the bandwidth of your botnet. You have to have something that can handle the traffic to measure how high you can go. Even if not, you might just want to continue testing. It's going to be important if you're selling DDOSes.