At this point I'm starting to wonder whether this isn't a competitor putting their investors money to work. It's otherwise utterly bizzare that someone would be so obsessive in damaging Linode. I really hope they make the details of the investigation public...
Linode, Github, Stackoverflow, Imgur, they've all been targeted. But what do they have in common? In a word: popularity. The core reason these sites are targeted is because it is impressive to others.
The source of this is typically two fold:
- For the lolz. Someone with a botnet just wants to show off, taking down something known gives them more notoriety.
- For a sales pitch. Someone has botnet capacity that they want to sell, and "I took down Linode" is a great way of demoing that to potential buyers.
The first one is more common when someone finds a new method of traffic multiplication and just wants to show it off (i.e. they trick a third party into DoS/DDoSing a target). The second one is legitimate criminal enterprises.
Github was also targeted by China to try to get them to delete certain repos that were unfriendly to China. Some people also saw it as showing off their power.
