DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service)

Definition: DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service): A DDoS attack is one that pits many machines against a single victim. An example is the attacks of February 2000 against some of the biggest websites. Even though these websites have a theoretical bandwidth of a gigabit/second, distributing many agents throughout the Internet flooding them with traffic can bring them down. Key point: The Internet is defenseless against these attacks. The best defense is for ISPs to do "egress filtering": prevent packets from going outbound that do not originate from IP addresses assigned to the ISP. This cuts down on the problem of spoofed IP addresses. History: The original DDoS tools were clonebots used during IRC wars. See also: zombie. From Hacking-Lexicon

* Linux/Unix/Computing Glossary