Attack to a website ?
- Thread starter Alex_tom
- Start date
This is basically how it works:
A person will use a trojan to gain control of 10,000+ computers (not as hard as you would think).
They then export a program to those computers (also known as nodes or zombies) that makes repeated attempts to access a website. Causing the server or "website" to hang.
Think of it this way, each one of those 10,000 computers send 100 attempts.
That's 10,000 x 100 is one million(1,000,000).
Often it is much higher than 10,000 and much higher than 100 attempts.
The server gets blogged down and starts to "deny" service to legit customers trying to connect to that server aka "website".
That is DDoS in a nut shell.
A person will use a trojan to gain control of 10,000+ computers (not as hard as you would think).
They then export a program to those computers (also known as nodes or zombies) that makes repeated attempts to access a website. Causing the server or "website" to hang.
Think of it this way, each one of those 10,000 computers send 100 attempts.
That's 10,000 x 100 is one million(1,000,000).
Often it is much higher than 10,000 and much higher than 100 attempts.
The server gets blogged down and starts to "deny" service to legit customers trying to connect to that server aka "website".
That is DDoS in a nut shell.
Also worth noting that the amount of clients needed to take a particular server down varies from website to website. Get something on the front page of Digg with cheap hosting and that's as good as being DDOSed (been there, done that!)
With some poor quality hosting you might not see 20 requests before your server falls over.
On the other hand, trying to launch such an attack on a site such as Google is a complete waste of time - it's designed to handle millions of requests a second from the word go...
With some poor quality hosting you might not see 20 requests before your server falls over.
On the other hand, trying to launch such an attack on a site such as Google is a complete waste of time - it's designed to handle millions of requests a second from the word go...
this wasn't my question or anything. but out of curiosity. why would anyone want to do this? i understand some people are kindof just miserable jerks that like to break in to stuff and ruin other peoples work etc. but it sounds like a lot of work for very little reward, what would happen for a website to piss you off this much?
It's actually often relatively little effort. The methodology and execution is well understood, and there's existing viruses out there that often run undiscovered that can be used for such an attack. You don't have to reinvent the wheel each time you start.
The other factor is that short of upgrading the server so it can handle the immense traffic load, there's not an awful lot you can do to stop it (there are detectors in place that can catch and block some of the traffic, but a well crafted attack is difficult to tell apart from a lot of real users accessing the site simultaneously.)
The alternative would be to often spend months in research trying to find a flaw in the site that you can exploit, perhaps to no avail (and you can't guarantee how long it'll stay there if you do find it - chances are after the first attack it'll be patched then you're back to square one.)
It's actually a pretty simple and (unfortunately) effective way of taking small to moderate sites offline for a specified period of time.
As to why? All sorts of reasons, but these sorts of attacks are often done in protest (taking down a site that a group of individuals don't agree with for instance.) Personal grudges also rank relatively highly, and yes some people do just do it for the heck of it.
The other factor is that short of upgrading the server so it can handle the immense traffic load, there's not an awful lot you can do to stop it (there are detectors in place that can catch and block some of the traffic, but a well crafted attack is difficult to tell apart from a lot of real users accessing the site simultaneously.)
The alternative would be to often spend months in research trying to find a flaw in the site that you can exploit, perhaps to no avail (and you can't guarantee how long it'll stay there if you do find it - chances are after the first attack it'll be patched then you're back to square one.)
It's actually a pretty simple and (unfortunately) effective way of taking small to moderate sites offline for a specified period of time.
As to why? All sorts of reasons, but these sorts of attacks are often done in protest (taking down a site that a group of individuals don't agree with for instance.) Personal grudges also rank relatively highly, and yes some people do just do it for the heck of it.
