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DDOS attacks are interesting because, as of now, it's basically the only classification of cyberattack that there's no provably correct method to prevent. Say
by ethanbond 12y ago
DDOS attacks are interesting because, as of now, it's basically the only classification of cyberattack that there's no provably correct method to prevent.
Say you get a letter every few weeks from a penpal from years back. You get a few other pieces of mail each day as well, so you quickly sort through them to see if your penpal wrote to you and if so, you pull that message out and throw away the rest.
Imagine you get to your mailbox one day and there are thousands of letters in it. The mail truck comes by for a second run and puts thousands more. Before you've even gotten back to your front door, a third truck comes and does the same.
It's no longer feasible for you to find out if your penpal wrote to you. That's a DDOS.
However, the post office was clearly receiving and processing all of those pieces of mail. They have the capability because they do it every day. Sure, the attacker put some extra load on them, but it wasn't a 100,000% increase like you sustained.
Your mailbox is Github, the post office is Google. Google's infrastructure is set up in a way that there's a lot of it.
- shockzzz 12y agoSo in theory, Google could DDoS anyone who has a smaller post office? Also, wouldn't a DNS provider or hosting service be able to "beef up" to handle the traffic from a DDoS? Especially if it's a nice one, it seems like something you'd expect from them.
- ethanbond 12y agoCorrect. Which is actually how this attack is happening. It's using Baidu's servers, which are ostensibly very robust. If you were to hijack Google/Amazon/Facebook/Netflix servers, you'd probably be able to DDOS nearly anyone on the planet. And yes, there are ways to essentially start throwing servers online and yes companies do it. The problem is it becomes obscenely expensive — if you do this and go bankrupt, again, the DDOS has succeeded. It's actually somewhat problematic to do it automatically for exactly that reason. What if you preferred to just take your service offline until you could investigate enough to stop the attack instead of pay hundreds of thousands per day in server costs? This is why DDOSs are a bitch! Edit: Also worth noting, it's probably for this reason that Github is still accessible: throwing servers online and eating the cost.