Yeah, Im an older player and have never really heard of DDoS attacks much until this AM. So I googled it, seems rather confusing and I can’t believe there aren’t ways to combat these things.
I just don’t really understand the “why” I guess.
Yes it’s easy if you know the server ip
Yes it’s illegal but they will never get in trouble because the government doesn’t know how to regulate the internet properly
Can’t stop other countries unless there are universal rules which there will never be
In 2018 someone actually got jail time for DDOS’ing Blizzard.
You’re right about the whole other country thing though. The US court justice system doesn’t have much power in other countries.
Lol, that’s a short sighted comment. They’ve been trying to pass laws to allow them to regulate the internet for a long, long time now.
The government knows how to do it, they simply won’t unless they can have total control over it. Hence why they are attempting to establish the laws for it before doing anything with it.
I just read this from 2018:
http s://www.justice.gov/usao-cdca/pr/romanian-computer-hacker-sentenced-one-year-federal-prison-staging-denial-service
Wow, had no idea… and that was 5 years ago.
That was one instance and it was because the dude bragged about it on social media which was his own fault lol
Yes it’s a crime and people who usually do this are tracked down and arrested.
It’s essentially sending requests to webservers that look normal, but the client has no interest in the result.
I.e. if I go to a website and hit refresh a thousand times, it takes the webserver time to process those requests (or to realize it should blacklist my IP for a while), and even once blacklisted, it takes time to check if I’m on the growing blacklist.
(1000 is a really small amount I’m just using it to illustrate the example)
Yes, in many jurisdictions. Also, in order to get a sizable number of machines for doing this, you need to compromise massive amounts of machines with malware in order to use them in the attack too, which is also often a crime.
There are protections (e.g. cloudflare, etc.) But they only work up to a certain capacity. Basically they take the ddos and pass you believed-clean traffic, but cloudflare’s not immune to ddos’ing either. They’re just an extra buffer for an attack.
this is false. there are kids that have threw away their live to have some lols with a ddos.
Huh? I don’t follow.
its a crime. they normally do catch people that try to do it if its a small group. if it took place in the usa the fbi normally handles it with their cyber crime team.
Yes, it’s illegal. In the past, it was a lot easier to find people who were doing this or who owned botnets (the networks that create the ddos) that the attacker controls. Today however, with all the IoT devices in everyone’s houses, it’s easy to create a ddos botnet and more easily thwart authorities. Either way they’re pathetic, haha.
A crime that’s hard to prosecute because the perpetrators often live in some place that has no extradition treaty with the US or EU, or they refuse to extradite.
Anyone trying to DDoS a US target from within the US is incredibly stupid 
Oh boy…regulate the internet properly. What could go wrong?
Yeah, and that is who usually does it. And they are found and arrested.
They are literally stupid.
This isn’t a hard thing to do these days and if you do it you will be found and arrested.
The hard thing about it is that all our IP addresses right now can be obtained. It might require a tool, but it may also just be readily available if you know what to look for.
The only way I know of to protect yourself from a DDoS is a VPN as they’d be attacking the VPN server instead of your network. Of course with a VPN comes increased latency depending on where it’s located in relation to you. Then there is also the issue of VPN data collection blah blah blah.
The DDoS itself is really simple: overload the target server with http packets that it can’t keep up with.
Why people do it? Anger or malicious intent. Maybe someone who’s a novice playing with stuff to see how it’s done.
And thank God they don’t. Ug, I can’t think of something more horrible than a government, ANY government having total control of the internet. You only have to look as far as Iran and China to see how that plays out.
The internet is both a dangerous and beautiful place. The downside to free unfettered access to knowledge is that disgusting things are also there.
Think of a DDoS attack like this.
There is a highway going to Blizzard HQ. There are vehicles on this highway that have business there, traffic is smooth.
Now add a million other vehicles on that highway, and those vehicles have no purpose going there.
Those million other vehicles are now causing a traffic jam, so the legitimate vehicles cannot get to the HQ.
That is a DDoS attack.
Yes, its a crime. But its virtually impossible to catch, and there are many countries that are 100% okay with people doing it as long as they don’t do it within their borders.
As to the why… well… sometimes its monetary, sometimes its ideological, and sometimes its just an immature idiot having fun at the expense of everyone.
That is the key part. And a very big if