Dirtbags on the Internet - Part 2 - DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service)

   A denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) or distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack) is an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users (wikipedia).

The distributed element in this attack means that there is no single attacker which can be blocked or traced but rather an army of attackers who often controlled by a single mastermind.

In a way, DDoS is what brought bots (or botnets) to the headlines the first time.

There are several "common" methods of attack in case of DDoS. Some include sending packets in an order which cause the receiver to spend precious resources (time, memory and CPU) analyzing and dropping them causing a denial of service of other "legitimate" traffic (e.g. SYN flood).

Old motives included fame and glory(such as taking down an entire country)

Or just not "liking" you

"Modern" motives are always around MONEY :

• Take down your competitor web site during product launch
• Extortion of businesses which are based on the internet (such as online gaming)

Anyway, the part I like best is when it comes "bot wars":

"If the United States found itself under a major cyberattack aimed at undermining the nation’s critical information infrastructure, the Department of Defense is prepared, based on the authority of the president, to launch a cyber counterattack or an actual bombing of an attack source."