DDOS Attacks

[eluser]Las3r[/eluser]
Correct Pete,

DDOS is litterly a flood of data towards a single ip address:

[ATTACKER] >>> [PACKETS] >>> [YOUR DATACENTER] >>>> [YOUR WEBSERVER]

The bottleneck (aka downtime-reason) is the [YOUR DATACENTER]. It get's spammed with megabits of traffic, so much that when you want to see your website, the webserver is still busy handling all the other connections, that services to you are denied (Ddos = Distributed Denial of service).

Quick comparison:

Let's say you have a phone at home. If 500.000 people call you at the same time, no matter how fast you answer - a lot of the calls will be getting the "busy-tone". Same for DDOS. A newer phone model (php protection , or CI in this case) won't help you anything, the bottleneck is in the phone line. If you get some more expensive hardware (CISCO Guard as a hardware firewall for example) you have more chance of blocking the attack (but large scale attacks will still be problematic).

I hope that answers your question.

Erik.