What is a DDoS?

A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is an attempt to make an online service unavailable by overwhelming it with traffic from multiple sources. They target a wide variety of important resources, from banks to news websites, and present a major challenge to making sure people can publish and access important information.

Google’s Digital Attack Map shows real time attacks as they happen. Today, you’ll notice the concentrated attacks on the US mostly on the east coast. Scary stuff!

While we can’t do anything outside of the WebAuthorings environment, we do have systems and technologies in place that prevent hacking attempts. When hackers try to access places where they shouldn’t be, our systems lock them out. To the hacker it appears as if we’ve gone off-line.

When I ran TheTrickery.com, we would lock down full countries for days on end. It’s a sad reality, but one that exists. This article was prompted by the DDoS attack again on Network Solutions earlier today. It’s the second time they’ve been down in a major way in less than 3 months.