DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks.

DDoS is when a person or many people attempt to bring down a server or website by overloading the server with requests.  When this is done it essentially prevents other people for accessing the website or service.

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What to expect?

Now if you attempt this attack by yourself there are a few outcomes that you could expect:

The first outcome is if you attempt to deny service to a big website such as Google or Wikipedia you won’t even make a dent and they will shrug you off like you were never there.

The second outcome is if you attempt to deny service to a medium sized website such as small to medium sized companies who host their own websites. You may slow them down or even take them down for a few minutes, but eventually all will be rectified and they will hopefully know better next time. [How to prevent DDoS attacks article coming soon]

The third outcome is if you attempt to deny service to a small website, something like your friend’s website or a personal website. These can be taken down very easy depending on your own connection.

There are many other things that can happen but these would be the main ones, DDoS attacks are more likely to succeed if you are doing them at the same time or set up botnet or zombie computers, more on them in my forthcoming articles.

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Big Attacks in the past:

On March 18^th the largest DDoS attack occurred, this attack was against Spamhaus, A not-for-profit anti-spam organisation. It began at 10Gbps and quickly escalated only to peak at 90Gbps. All was quiet for a few days until March 22^nd when the attack resumed and peaks at 120Gbps. This was the biggest(at the time of writing) attack ever preformed...

But did it “break the internet” like it was intended? No, Spamhaus had measures in place to prevent such attacks which kept the systems online, Now not to say that it wasn't a valiant effort but unfortunately this time it didn't succeed.

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How to attack using DDoS?

Most people use a program to perform their DDoS attacks these days, but I’ll show you that in a moment, the old way to do things would be as follows:

1.      Open your command line

2.      Type: "ping [website or IP] -l 5120 -n 100000 -w 1"

The website or IP allows you to type one or the other, so for instance it could be www.google.com or 74.125.24.147.

The “5120” is the size of the packet your want to send, in this example it is 5KB, this must not surpass your own capabilities or you could deny your service and not anyone else’s.

Then the “100000” is the amount of packets you wish to send to the target, this can be as many or as little as you want, the more you send the longer the attack will last.

Finally the “–w 1” is the amount of time you wish to wait before the next packet is sent, this can also be altered to suit the individual attack.

Now that the basic ways are covered I will move onto the programs that people use, there are many programs out there that can be used but be warned that a lot of these programs contain backdoors which will allow the backdoor maker access to your computer, you are best to get clean programs from sources. Some programs will appear to be infected according to your anti-virus but that is expected, and is up to your own judgment whether you wish to use it or not.

A lot of people swear by the LOIC or the Low Orbit Ion Cannon as it was so funnily called. The LOIC is a program created by anonymous members from the website www.4chan.org. All that is needed to do is you type in the website name that you wish to attack, lock on, set thread count(9001 max) and then hit the “IMMA CHARGIN MAH LAZAR!” button and the attack will be started.

Any attack has a greater success rate if carried out simultaneously by multiple people. This can be accomplished by getting friends to do this with you or by using botnets. Also when carrying out these attacks it is recommended to use a VPN either paid or free.

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Disclaimer:

All methods shown in this article are for educational use only, This website will not be held responsible for your actions (but if you do something stupid feel free to let us know so we can have a giggle ;) )