ix various operational aspects in the wild. Our results reveal how blackholing is applied in practice by operators. We show that for nearly 4% of attacks that are mitigated using blackholing, it takes more than 24 hours following the end of the attack for operators to retract the countermeasure. During this time, blackholed hosts are cutoff from the Internet (at least partially). The apparent lack of automation in recovery raises concern that hosts as well as services running on them may be cutoff from users unnecessarily. In addition, we unveil that less intense attacks are also blackholed: in 13% of cases the inferred attack traffic volume is at most 3 M bps. As blackholing effectively brings about a 'self-inflicted' DoS, these findings raise the question of how much (or little) effort is required for attackers to get operators to trigger such an extreme countermeasure.Focusing on the third contribution, this thesis investigates, for both mitigation solutions under consideration, hazards that can hamstring DoS defenses. Cloud-based protection services may be bypassed by sophisticated attackers as a result of mistakes in deployment. Mistakes may not be clearly understood by all users, which can lead to a false sense of security. We quantify this drawback on the Internet, focusing on the world's most popular Web sites, and on leading commercial protection services. Our results underpin the extent of the problem: the protection of 41% of Web sites under consideration can be bypassed. As for blackholing, this thesis takes preliminary steps towards investigating the extent to which hosts are cutoff unnecessarily. We quantify this in terms of common Internet services that run on blackholed hosts. This thesis will show from its outset that a basic challenge that we are faced with concerns data. Acquiring and developing diverse (raw) data sources to methodologically study the DoS problem constitutes a challenge. While this thesis comes a long way by systematically fusing data sources, future research, the research community and, more generally speaking, society, stand to benefit from improvements in data sharing. For this reason, this thesis also calls for structural improvements in data sharing. xii rence 1.5-jaar). Tezamen representeren deze zones circa de helft van alle globale domeinnamen. We onderzoeken ook tot in hoeverre slachtoffers van DoS aanvallen diensten ingebruiknemen na een aanval (we noemen dit migratie). Onze resultaten tonen aan dat de intensiteit van een aanval een belangrijke factor is voor migratie, terwijl herhaling en de duur van aanvallen dat niet zijn. Qua BGP blackholing onderzoekt dit proefschrift verscheidene operationele aspecten 'in het wild'. Onze resultaten tonen aan hoe blackholing in de praktijk wordt ingezet door operatoren. Voor bijna 4% van DoS aanvallen die met blackholing werden gemitigeerd duurde het langer dan 24 uur nadat de aanval gestopt was eer operatoren het ingezette middel terugtrokken. Gedurende deze tijd zijn de beschermde machines niet bereikbaar voor (delen van) het I...