Ok so like two days in a row there is someone DDOSing Blizzard WoW classic servers.
How can someone does this to such a big company? They have so many resources. And how hard is it to track the person who does this? I rly dont understand why would anyone do this in a first place, will the person go to jail for this or is it “untrackable”?
In: Technology
What is the hacker’s incentive for DDOSsing the servers?
Let’s say there was a free text service that texted you the weather if you sent it a text first. You want to mess with your friend so you text the service but tell it to respond to your friends number!
Now the service doesn’t want to miss sending you a message so it automatically tries again 4 times if it doesn’t go through.
If just you did that its annoying but not enough to cripple your friends phone. But if you got 20 of your buddies to play along and do it then now your buddies phone can’t keep up. The message service isn’t getting messages through so it keeps trying 4x (for each missed request). At some point your buddy and his phone won’t be able to keep up and you’ll lock it up and prevent it from doing anything else.
That’s what a ddos attack is.
Basically DDOS is when a lot of computers try and connect to the server at the same time to overwhelm it.
The reason why people can DDOS multibillion dollar companies is because
1. They have a lot of computers under their disposal (i.e their botnet is very big)
2. There is some weakness in the server it self.
Most of the case, it is a combination of these two.
As for tracking, yes it is absolutely possible to track down who initiated the DDOS, though it does take some work.
Essentially, there is a virus on a million computers out there that can give someone control over those computers.
When that guy gives the right command, all those computers start asking a server for information, and the server fails.
It is very hard, often impossible to track down who did it, if they are smart.
A couple of decades ago the infected machines would basically connect a client to IRC, and the attack would be directed by commands in an IRC channel. The coordinator would connect to IRC via a proxy/vpn to issue the command. Even years ago it would be difficult to track the person doing the attack, and now we have TOR…
If someone is caught it’ll probably be because they boasted about it on a forum somewhere, with a login name they used for something else that is then linked.
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