Denial of Service is the concept of overwhelming a system (digital/computer or otherwise) with bogus usage, to the point that legitimate users can no longer access it. Imagine submitting thousands of FOIA requests to your local city government. Legally, they have to respond to them, even if it’s to reject them as bogus. So, if anyone else submits one, it’s just gonna get buried in the pile. Maybe they get to it, eventually, or maybe it actually just gets lost, or even accidentally thrown out when they decide to just throw away all the bogus ones.
Now, if you were to actuallly do this, your city government would probably just start binning all your requests, immediately, when they realize you’re not submitting them in good faith. Hell, maybe they even get you banned from the building, for harassment. That’s where “Distributed” comes into play. To combat this, what you’d do is get a whole bunch of your friends (you’ve got thousands of friends willing to waste time dealing with the government, right?) to each submit just one or two applications. They can no longer just throw them out based on the name of the submitter, they have to again spend more time inspecting each one, to see if it’s legit, and then process it, if it is. MUCH tougher to defend against.
DDoS stands for Distributed Denial of Service.
Denial of Service is the concept of overwhelming a system (digital/computer or otherwise) with bogus usage, to the point that legitimate users can no longer access it. Imagine submitting thousands of FOIA requests to your local city government. Legally, they have to respond to them, even if it’s to reject them as bogus. So, if anyone else submits one, it’s just gonna get buried in the pile. Maybe they get to it, eventually, or maybe it actually just gets lost, or even accidentally thrown out when they decide to just throw away all the bogus ones.
Now, if you were to actuallly do this, your city government would probably just start binning all your requests, immediately, when they realize you’re not submitting them in good faith. Hell, maybe they even get you banned from the building, for harassment. That’s where “Distributed” comes into play. To combat this, what you’d do is get a whole bunch of your friends (you’ve got thousands of friends willing to waste time dealing with the government, right?) to each submit just one or two applications. They can no longer just throw them out based on the name of the submitter, they have to again spend more time inspecting each one, to see if it’s legit, and then process it, if it is. MUCH tougher to defend against.