DDoS - What is it, and how does it effect you?
DDos or DoS stands for
"Denial of Service", or "Distributed Denial of Service".
In the simplest of terms - A DDoS attack uses many computers distributed across the Internet in an attempt to consume available resources on the target.
How does it influence the service?
Imagine logging onto a site. That site hosts pages and communicates with other elements. That communication eats up bandwidth that we pay for to our service providers. Very similarly how you, the user, eat up bandwidth by streaming YouTube and browsing the net with your ISP (the ones that have bandwidth limitations eat it up, the ones that dont never care
).
ALL sites, not just gaming sites - but all sites on the whole of internet, CM included, and every other site online, pays for their servers and pays for the bandwidth in accordance to their demands. Based on the traffic a site has, a site would need more, or less bandwidth accordingly. This is considered part of our e-commerce business cost.
Now, to expalin the impact of a DDoS, first we need to explain a difference between a bit, and a byte. In computer terms, one byte consists of 8 bits. Similarly to how one unit of currency consists of one hundred cents.
Bandwidth is measured in megaBITS or gigaBITS; while file size on your computer is measured in megaBYTES, or gigaBYTES. so 1 BYTE = 8 BITS; One MegaByte = 8 MegaBits.
as a result 1 MegaByte (1MB - capital B) = 8 MegaBits (8Mb - small b)
For example: if CasinoMesiter homepage is 1MB (Megabyte) in "weight" (meaning all pics and pages and texts have a size of one megabyte); and if CM servers have a bandwidth float of 8Mbps (Megabits per second)
then that would mean that CM can handle ONE user loading the homepage per second. Now, pages are rarely that large and sites are able to sustain many hundreds of users calling their pages per second, or as we call it "concurrent users" (users logged on at the same time).
So each one of you, users, takes a small part of our "same-time" capacity. When we reach larger volumes of traffic, our revenue increases, so we buy more bandwidth. I hope that is clear so far.
What DDoS attack does, is create bots (robots) - in fact, it creates many thousands and millions of bots and sends immeasurable amounts of fake traffic to websites, creating massive resource usage. it looks like we have thousands of users, but we do not, we have little "spiders" crawling up and down our pages creating havoc and eating up resource. These attacks create so many calls and simultaneous requests, that the servers and the bandwidth simply give out under the weight.
When you hear about "Anonymous" bringing the department of justice site offline - that's basically what happens. The sites are unable to handle the load being pushed onto them.
There is no other goal with a DDoS attack but to bring a site offline and make a business unable to operate. There are no other benefits than to blackmail the business to "pay up, or else"
There are ways to protect against this, they are both highly expensive and complex - and for most attacks, you, the end user, never feel it had occurred. This particular attack is incredibly powerful, which is the reason i am writing this public post and calling on any operator who has experienced a similar threat to reach out to me.
This by no means implies that the service remains unprotected. This simply means that we have to spend a pretty large sum of monies to increase our resiliency barriers. I'm highly surprised with recent events, and so are my service providers who have admitted these attacks have been the "internal talk of town" in the last 6 months and belong to a highly organised group stemming from Eastern Europe. This information however, remains unconfirmed.
So far the situation has been mitigated. I'll keep you posed on further developments.
Best,
Igor
)
I don't know anything about bitcoin, if they're asking to be 'paid' in that currency must mean that it's untraceable right? If that's the case I'm surprised the DOJ or the Feds aren't all over it like the Liberty Reserve thing from last year. Untraceable money screams of washing the proceeds of crime. To me, at least.
