Gadgetory

have you ever been browsing your favorite web site or watching your favorite online video stream only to have your access suddenly slowed to a crawl or cut off and I'm not talking about a frustrated parent spouse child or pet yanking the cord and then you realize that every other site is working fine well your initial response might be those ding wads need to upgrade their network connection and servers which if they're experiencing higher than usual web traffic may actually be the case but another likely scenario is that the site is being hit by a distributed denial of service or DDoS attack these nuisances come in many forms amplification attacks nooks tear drops of Smurfs etc but most operate in pretty much the same manner by utilizing a large network of remote pcs called a botnet when grouped together like this to overwhelm another systems connection or processor causing it to deny service to the legitimate traffic it's receiving the first type of attack could be considered your standard blitzkrieg type because it attempts to directly overwhelm a system often by plugging all of its ports with garbage streams like incessant pings are endless fragmented packets without rebuilding instructions it's about the equivalent of a kid in the backseat asking are we there yet are we there yet are we there yet leaving absolutely no dead air to actually respond to say for the last time no we're not there yet next up is your crank calls attacks that cause further bandwidth and processing congestion by forcing the server to actually respond to their nonsense this can be done in a number of ways by forcing a website to handshake endlessly with new systems or attempt to validate spam port connection requests before eventually giving out an ICMP destination error or in the case of get requests attacks triggering the sort of large-scale file transfers that only happened naturally when Taylor Swift releases a new single on iTunes our third type of attack the most deadly move in the das2 arsenal is the DNS server amplification attack or as I call it the Deathstar this technique uses an individual pcs ability to act as its own domain name server to request the same sort of junk from the other techniques then forward it to a target amplifying the severity of the attack as much as 70 fold this technique is apparently what allowed narrow drew Wells to launch an attack on the scale of 400 gigabit per second recently 50 times the largest recorded attack 10 years ago at eight gigabit per second alright Linus so I guess I get it some junk runs in the background of my PC turning it into a zombie for this so-called botnet but why would anyone want to do this good question and there's a wide range of motivations from hacktivist groups trying to block access to terrorist recruitment websites to gamers targeting opponents to increase their ping times for a competitive edge to folks who apparently just want to watch the world burn but the good news is protection against these sorts of attacks is getting easier and more affordable than ever with techniques like running data through a high capacity server or using scrubbing filters that prevent huge amounts of fake traffic from causing more than just a momentary slowdown not that these techniques help with the last kind of distributed denial of service attack the kind we're about to unleash on lynda.com where we use a SiC 10 day free trial offer to cause copious numbers of real users to flood to a site to experience the kind of learning that only Linda can provide lynda.com is courses are taught by real industry experts on subjects as diverse as programming Photoshop or even business and since you can learn at your own pace wherever you are and whenever you've got some free time meaning you actually don't all have to go to the site at the same time so that's good it's a great way to improve your enjoyment of your hobby or even kick start a new career so head over to lynda.com slash tech wiki and sign up for your free trial today so I guess that's pretty much it guys thanks for watching like the video if you liked it dislike it if you thought it sucked leave a comment if your feelings were more complicated than that or you have suggestions for future fast as possible and as always don't forget to subscribe and follow and all that good stuff