About a month ago, veteran anti-spam campaigners
Spamhaus became embroiled in a
massive DDoS attack.
A DoS, or
denial of service, is where you deliberately waste the resources of a legitimate online service, for example by sending lots of pointless emails or purposely uploading files that you know cause processing problems for someone's server.
(It's a bit like phoning someone you don't like over and over throughout the night, even though you have nothing to say, just so they keep waking up.)
A DDoS is a
distributed DoS, where you persuade or trick a raft of other people to join in the attack, each one starting what amounts to a DoS in its own right.
