Denial-of-service attack (nonfiction)

In computing, a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) is a cyber-attack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host connected to the Internet. Denial of service is typically accomplished by flooding the targeted machine or resource with superfluous requests in an attempt to overload systems and prevent some or all legitimate requests from being fulfilled.

In a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack), the incoming traffic flooding the victim originates from many different sources. This effectively makes it impossible to stop the attack simply by blocking a single source.

A DoS or DDoS attack is analogous to a group of people crowding the entry door of a shop, making it hard for legitimate customers to enter, thus disrupting trade.

Criminal perpetrators of DoS attacks often target sites or services hosted on high-profile web servers such as banks or credit card payment gateways. Revenge, blackmail, and activism can motivate these attacks.

Analogy

Google engineer George Conard offers this explanation of distributed denial-of-service attacks:

Your daughter is turning ten and you're going to have a birthday party for her. And you're going to have cake at the birthday party. And you invite ten or fifteen of her friends. But somebody who doesn't like you wants to interfere with this in some way. So, they get an invitation printed up and they post 5,000 of those invitations all over Manhattan and say, "Free cake at this address, at this time."

And on the day of the party, your daughter's friends are trying to get there and the streets are clogged. The doorway is jammed up and they can't get in. That's essentially what a DDoS attack is. It is sending so much information toward a website that either the server itself can't handle the load and just shuts down. Or in some cases, that the internet connection toward that server is jammed up and none of the legitimate requests can actually get in.

So that's what a DDoS attack is.

Source: https://www.pcmag.com/news/357591/inside-project-shield-jigsaws-anti-ddos-machine

Fiction cross-reference

• Crimes against mathematical constants
• Gnomon algorithm
• Gnomon Chronicles

Nonfiction cross-reference

• Computation (nonfiction)

External links:

• Denial-of-service attack @ Wikipedia
• Inside Project Shield: Jigsaw's Anti-DDoS Machine @ pcmag.com