I was here thinking...
So cloudflare does ddos protection, right?
So they must get alot of damaged hardware(because of hard and <i>damaging</i> attacks)
How do they deal with it? Throw it all on trash? Reuse it for less powerful demands? Give the usable(but not for their tier) away?
I do not believe network protection,in this context, works in same ways a physical protection,e.g. Armour.<p>Network hardware properly designed to withstand certain kinds of attacks will not be physically damaged by their use. Put another way,a piece of hardware that withstands (has capacity for) X number of transactions per second will no more get damaged if it is discarding vs processing them.<p>This is not to say there's no way to damage hardware with software but I don't believe the question is that generic.
We don't have attacks that damage hardware. We do have disks that wear out. We secure erase them and then have them physically destroyed. I cannot think of an instance where we've had to replace a network card because of DDoS damage.