"airedaletwo91402" posted the following on yahoo's freerepublic2 yesterday. The URL's given below are very informative regarding denial of service attacks, even to someone like me who has just a basic understanding of networking and internet routing. Computer geeks will really like it:
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For a DDOS you need far more than just one computer. A hacker has control of many many computers because of trojans or lack of firewalls. Each of those computers which are under the total control of the hacker via bots sends packets to a specific IP address. The shear number of packets being sent by the 100+ computers overwhelms the pipeline into the specific IP address. If you want to read about how this works and see what can be done by someone who knows how find the culprits go to
http://grc.com/dos/grcdos.htm and
http://grc.com/dos/drdos.htm It reads kind of like a Tom Clancy short story especially the first one.
The main URL for Gibbson Research Company (GRC) is
http://www.grc.com This is a internet security company and has a lot of other good stuff at it's site. Make sure you take a look at his free stuff like Leak Test, Unplug-N-Pray, Xpdite and the two socket locks (go to the free stuff section). Also they have some excellent newsgroups dealing with security (hardware & software), spam, and number of other topics. It's a great place to ask techie type questions. The level of people participating are from low level users through high level tech geeks and security pros. The information you get via these news groups is usually quick and correct. General tech problems are covered in the techtalk group. To get to the newsgroups you can either go through the website (it's at the bottom) where you can only read the newsgroups or add grc.com as a news server and subscribe to the groups you want. These are very active groups so there is a lot of message traffic. Also because of Steve's high profile he's often subject to DDOS attacks so there will be times when they aren't reachable or the service is slow. A number of times I have gotten the message that I haven't been able to reach the server in 60 seconds and should the newsreader quit or wait. I choose wait.
It's one of the best newsgroups sites on the Internet for people who have even the slightest interest in the subjects covered because of the quality of information provided.
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Thanks for your reply. This is very interesting:
For a DDOS you need far more than just one computer. A hacker has control of many many computers because of trojans or lack of firewalls. Each of those computers which are under the total control of the hacker via bots sends packets to a specific IP address. The shear number of packets being sent by the 100+ computers overwhelms the pipeline into the specific IP address.
The very popular internet based Morpheus music "sharing" (stealing) freeware is well-known by the IT community to have trojan horse routines embedded within it.
Perhaps, these routines have gone active.
Millions of X-ers, Y-ers and younger use this software on internet connected computers from around the world to "share" (steal) digital music. This would serve as the perfect springboard for launching a DDOS attack.
As much as Grampa Dave would like us to think, this is not just a Freeper-specific problem.
jriemer