“Let’s take a Linux-focused look at denial of service attacks
and what we can do as responsible Internet citizens to assist in
preventing them.”
“A denial of service attack is any act intended to cause a
service to become unavailable or unusable. In an Internet
environment, a service might be an application such as a web or
mail server, or a network service like routing of
datagrams….”
“A distributed denial of service attack exploits several
machines to make the attack. Distributed denial of service attacks
are the most effective and insidious because they can generate more
traffic from more sources. This makes it much harder to identify
the attack’s source, and more difficult to resolve.”