Belkira the Tulip wrote:
Mindel wrote:
DDOS attacks aren't something that you just stop. It's like a flood and you have to stop it by building up a brick wall to protect yourself. Until you have every little hole plugged, some of the flood is still going to get through.
So what is a "DDOS attack?"
A Denial of Service attack means that someone is flooding a server on the network with a large volume of invalid traffic. Routers and other pieces of network hardware have physical limitations on how much data they can process, so a large enough flood will make a piece of network hardware (a router, for example, or a web server) unable to respond reliably to legitimate requests.
A DDOS attack follows the same principle, but instead of generating the traffic from one central location, a network of compromised systems (this is one of the reasons you scan for malware and viruses) is used like a giant zombie army to bombard a network resource with traffic from myriad different IPs and routes.