sleeky01 said:
Then I'll put the question to everyone.....If it's so easy to DDoS a network what can be done to prevent or inoculate a network to this?
If the local neighbourhood brats keep doing a run-by smash of your window, you would eventually set up a camera for the cops look at or put up a metal grate.
Nothing. Thats why its so effective. there is no way to protect yourself agianst a DDoS attack other than to disconnect from the network. DDoS pretends to be normal traffic, and thus its impossible to differentiate it from normal users. as such, you can either keep responding to DDoS attack (which is why it works, your machine has to respond million times per second to the attacker saying something like "error: packet not recognized". by responding to atacker it has no juice left to repsonmd to legitimate costumers and thus the service stalls. you cant just ignore it, because that would both break the IP protocol and would not achieve anything since your service still has to process request.
There are some things you CAN do and some ways you can negate it.
First possible solution would be to have faster internet than the DDoSer. if you can route more traffic than he can spew, you will have a large load but still remain functional and thus they would not achieve the goal, evnetually get bored and quit. this of course is easy to do when its a neighboarhood kid on steam doing the DDoS and hard to do when its a horde of 1000 zombie computers doing the DDoSing. because then you have to outdo 1000 machines with 1.
another solution is you could try throttling that persons network in a similar way, but thats, just like DDoS itself, is not legal.
Of course, you should always call the police. DDoSing is illegal and if they catch the DDoSer or at least scare it away you won. sadly much police does not take it seriuosly (actually in German DDoSing is even recognized as legitimate protest).
BUt yeah, DDoS is kind a scary not because its somehow damaging but because there is nothing you can do to protect it. some big hosting companies try rerouting traffic so only the place where DDoS originated gets affected but they can afford multiple machine routing, most people dont.
imagine DDoS like if you had a store and a costumer would come in asking if you sell eggs, you say you dont, costumer leaves the store. no harm no foul right? imagine now that there are 1000 costumers coming in every minute asking same question again and again. and now you dont have time to service actual paying costumers. but you must answer the question, because you dont know if the costumer is legitimate one or one of the "Eggs" ones.