Penguin
Note: You are viewing an old revision of this page. View the current version.

A denial of service attack prevents a machine from carrying out its main duties - for example, preventing a web server from serving up pages.

A distributed denial of service attack normally means many clients are sending repeated requests to a machine to saturate its bandwidth, preventing legitimate requests to get through. These clients have typically been infected with a virus and are sent instructions regarding when and where to attack. They are then known as "zombies".