A friend of mine asked me to literally "explain like I'm five" how a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack works, because World of Warcraft was having troubles yesterday after the launch of Warlords Of Draenor, and he was trying to tell his kid why. My answer:
When you play Warcraft, the computer that represents you is always "talking" through the internet to the computer that has everything in the WoW world. Computers have a limited attention span; they can talk to a lot of people at the same time, but not everybody in the world.
Usually they have enough attention to talk to all the people who are trying to play WoW at the same time. But sometimes bad people don't want the game to work right, so they pretend to be a million people and all try to talk to the computer at once. The world computer doesn't know who's a real person and who's not, so it gets confused and talks to all the million fake people. Then it doesn't have time to talk to you, so the game goes slow because it can't send you information about what's happening fast enough.
Sometimes people do this because they're mad at the company, and sometimes just because they think it's funny. It's against the law, but it's hard for the police to understand, so usually the company that is getting attacked has to deal with it on their own.
When you play Warcraft, the computer that represents you is always "talking" through the internet to the computer that has everything in the WoW world. Computers have a limited attention span; they can talk to a lot of people at the same time, but not everybody in the world.
Usually they have enough attention to talk to all the people who are trying to play WoW at the same time. But sometimes bad people don't want the game to work right, so they pretend to be a million people and all try to talk to the computer at once. The world computer doesn't know who's a real person and who's not, so it gets confused and talks to all the million fake people. Then it doesn't have time to talk to you, so the game goes slow because it can't send you information about what's happening fast enough.
Sometimes people do this because they're mad at the company, and sometimes just because they think it's funny. It's against the law, but it's hard for the police to understand, so usually the company that is getting attacked has to deal with it on their own.
