Hey, everyone, Josh from Computer Fitness back with another award-winning article to help you with your computer conundrums.
Cyber criminals are out there; there´s no denying it. More and more we hear about attacks in the US or abroad against networks, companies, and governments. This is the same as it ever was, people trying to take from others. The methodology has changed and that is what we´re going to talk about today. One of the more common ways that attackers will go after a network is a DDoS, or Distributed Denial of Service.
When you contact a website, send an email, etc. You are exchanging data. That´s how this whole thing works. Various pieces of hardware route the data and make sure it gets divided up and sent to the right places. Now, have you ever seen a website that was “just taking forever today”? That´s an example of too much traffic being funneled through too small of an area. What a DDoS does, is a play on this weakness and flood the target with traffic.
Now, rather than some of the other methods of attack where a single user is the culprit, DDoS relies on hundreds of thousands of machines all forcing their way in at once. This leaves the routers et al. with far too much traffic to handle and they crash under the weight; the attackers now have what they want, a denial of service to anyone who uses the site.
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-Josh
