How do they know that behind the scenes Cloudflare has not handed over whatever IP and financial information they have on the attackers to the feds? AFAIK such things would not be disclosed until the attackers are locked up and the case is closed assuming such details are ever disclosed at all.

Because cloudflare is and always has been a bad actor. They protect all sorts of illegal stuff.

This is the dumbest post I’ve read. The attackers have a site seemingly hosted by/orange clouded by Cloudflare. They aren’t providing botnet or DDOS capabilities. Cloudflare tries to act as a third party that follows the law when the law gets involved. They don’t want to actively police the internet in the same way they don’t actively abolish piracy (see Anna’s Archive). There are exceptions to this of course, but on average I don’t find it necessary for Cloudflare to knock down the site of the attackers because they sell illegal services. Isn’t this what HN bitches about anyways, CF being a centralised authority? Now you’re bitching that it’s not using its centralisation powers?

Because their entire racket is providing MITM and DDoS as a service.

So Cloudflare can sell DDoS protection to Canonical.

The post seems skip explanation of what Cloudflare's involvement is?

and white supremacists, but not sex workers?

Remember that Cloudflare does a MITM on every connection to every website they front.

CF not only protects them... they have real time intelligence on who is getting attacked, who is paying for it, and all the parameters of the attack (type, volume, duration, etc).

What would your sales team give for leads this hot?