Good article by Dancho:
With the average price for a DDoS attack on demand decreasing due to the evident over-supply of malware infected hosts, it should be fairly logical to assume that the “on demand DDoS” business model run by the cybercriminals performing such services is blossoming.
Interestingly, what used to be a group that was exclusively specializing in DDoS attacks, is today’s cybercrime enterprise “vertically integrating” in order to occupy as many underground market segments as possible, all of which originally developed thanks to the “malicious economies of scale” (massive SQL injections through search engines’ reconnaissance, standardizing the social engineering process, the money mule recruitment process, diversifying the standardized and well proven propagation/infection vectors etc.) offered by a botnet.
More here.
Alex Eckelberry