What is DDoS?
DDos stands for Distributed Denial of Service. You see, one way of preventing DoS attacks is to set up automatic filters which block repeated identical requests from the same source, since a given user has no reason to want to see the same page over and over. This is where DDoS comes in. Since you could filter (and, for that matter, easily track down) a single source DoS attack, the attackers have found a way to beat that. DDoS attacks are performed by cracking into a large number of powerful computers (which have nothing to do with either the attacked system or the attacker) and using their resources to generate the thousands of requests. The site under attack is now faced with an overwhelming number of requests, but they are not all coming from the same source, so they cannot easily provide a filter to exclude the illegitimate requests without also excluding their legitimate users. Also, even once the administrators have tracked the source of the overload, they can identify only the
