perhaps an automated search to find weak (old) client of bitcoin network that they mine, too ... to steal ?
No, that doesn't work since it affects also new nodes and up to date nodes like my own. What are "weak clients"?
If it was a test on the node strengths, they would've prewarned the people operating the nodes in tat region in order to tell them that there may be problems.
In an optimal scenario, yes. However, if the final intent is malicious then I doubt that they'd warn someone.
It is unusual that a cryptocurrency node may be affected in this way (as in it being DoSed).
From what I could gather, currently they could only negatively affect nodes with a limited amount of connection.
I think that any normal activity wouldn't do this to a node as traffic would surely be redirected once the ports are full?
No, this is certainly not normal activity especially if you look at the number of nodes and their IPs. I guess implementing a 'activity' detection policy that flags nodes as suspicious wouldn't be a bad idea (would help detect some of these).
It'd be difficult to detect suspicious nodes as you'd have to use other nodes to do it and then something out to those other nodes to get them to block that IP?
So eventually, you could get a person that could hack the bitcoin network by blocking all of the IPs from one of the main nodes and significantly reduce the time it takes for a transaction to be added to the blockchain.
Also, doesn't everything have a "limited connection". I don't think nodes have several gigabits of bandwidth through them so they could face attacks trough that if there is a person with servers in a data centre doing nothing and tey just want to see what damage they could do with them then they could seriously harm your connections.
If it was a test on the network, there would've been some sort of warning (If it is a test with innocent intents, but it isn't).
