Situation Update (from Pandora)

[TPC]

annuit, You don't need to be particularly clever to do it. Any idiot with access to a few computers can do it.

Anyway, as a computer technician I know that protecting against a ddos attack is nearly impossible, so keep up the good work GMs.

Some explanations of what these kinds attacks are, how they work:

DoS attack: Denial of Service, basically means that a service is taken down by unauthorized malicious means, doesn't have to be a flooding attack, can be anything that makes it so normal users can't access it. Can usually be blocked with a firewall rule once you find out about it.

DDoS attack: Distributed Denial of Service, means that there are multiple computers attacking, basically trying to use up all available resources (can be one or more of several resources, for instance using up all bandwidth, or using up the connections up until a connection limit) so legitimate users can't use them, thus blocking legitimate users to get on. Can be anything from a few home computers to a botnet of thousands of computers doing the attacking, depending on how large the attack is.

Filtering DDoS attacks is very hard. If you're lucky they are doing an attack that is based on something else than using up all bandwidth, and in that case you may be able to at least partially stop them with a firewall rule. But most of the time it is a bandwidth attack,a nd and thats hard to stop, because even if you block all IPs on the server they can still flood your connection (which is limited at a point before it gets to the actual server) so no one else can get trought.

The only thing you can do against this is to do the filtering at an earlier level that has more bandwidth available than the attackers can come up with. That is, if its a relatively small attack, maybe at the hosting company (looks like that is what they are trying here, I hope it works), but most of the time if its a large attack you have to go to the ISP and do it at the ISP level. And unless you're a large company the ISP is likely to just tell you to wait it out. Waiting it out until the attacker gets bored is the most common way to handle a DDoS, since its so hard to defend against.