There’s lots of bad stuff on the Internet these days. In this post and the next few, I’m going to talk about some of the kinds of bad stuff and what you can do to protect yourself. The first one we’re going to talk about is a Distributed Denial of Service, or DDOS. It’s mainly called DDOS so we don’t have to type out Distributed Denial of Service every time (I admit, I copy and pasted that second one so I didn’t have to type it the second time).

A DDOS is where the attacker tries to overwhelm the target with so much traffic that they can’t do anything. Imagine your connection to the Internet as a pipe.

The Internet as a Pipe

The pipe flows both ways. It lets you send traffic to the Internet (like sending an email) or receive traffic (like reading https://computerlamp.net/). A DDOS attack fills that pipe up by sending you so much traffic you can’t do anything. You can’t send packets out, nor can you surf the web. You’re basically knocked off the net.

When a company is DDOS’d, they can lose money. For example, if I sell computer lamps on my website and someone DDOS’s it, I can’t take any more orders. I’m losing money because of this attack.

We’ve talked about how a DDOS can deny your service from happening, but where does the word distributed come in? In the old days, a massive amount of traffic would come to your computer from one IP address. It turns out, firewalls stop that attack really well.

The bad guys had to find a new way to attack and they did it by sending the traffic from many IP addresses. Blocking one IP address is easy, blocking 10,000 is not so easy. Especially when they change during the attack.

What do you do if you’re the victim of a DDOS attack? Well, if it’s just your home computer, you can probably wait it out. Or if you’re using DHCP, you can change your IP address and hope they don’t find you. If that doesn’t help, contact your ISP.