Before "Cablegate" (the Wikileaks diplomatic cables scandal),
those of us who are relatively ignorant about the internet (non-
geeks in other words) had never heard the term DDOS, or if we
had, we thought it was some kind of software like Windows DOS.
But in fact, DDOS attacks have been striking terror into the
hearts of IT specialists in the major companies for over 10
years now, and they severely disrupted Wikileaks in late 2010.
DDOS is a more radical and damaging version of a DOS attack: the
acronym DOS means "Denial of Service". The idea of a DOS is to
render a website inaccessible to its visitors. Either the site
is blocked altogether, or it is severely slowed down. The pirate
orchestrating the attack has a number of ways of paralysing a
targeted website: he can cut the power supply to the server,
though this is rare. The technique most often used is to
inundate the target site with requests so that it becomes
saturated. This involves thousands of computers attempting to
download the same page of the tar