Keep Getting Logged out

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Maybe you should call Coast to Coast AM about it.

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For the last day or two most of us have noticed that the Internet is not behaving as the Internet should. Sites are going offline, slowing down, disappearing altogether for protracted periods of time. Even this site was taken offline for a fair amount of time last night, along with many of the other sites that deal with similar topics.

Those of us who are at least a little computer experienced or literate understand that events, like these, are usually caused by attacks known as Distributed Denial of Service attacks - or DDoS in shorthand. If robbery is the risk of owning a bank or a store - then DDoS is the equivalent for cyberspace.

For those who do not understand what a DDoS attack is, there are metaphors that can help. Imagine that you are home, alone, and that there are two doors in the house you are occupying. You hear a knock at the front door, so you get up to answer it - only to find nobody is there. At that exact same instant, there is a knock at the back door - so you run to it. Same thing.

Now repeat this process over and over, very rapidly, and keep adding more doors. Eventually you shut down and stop answering them at all or become so overwhelmed trying to answer them that you collapse.

Our metaphoric doors in this case are ports - parts of your computer that talk to and listen to the Internet. And the knocks are packets - the method that all those ones and zeroes travel through the lines to end up being Youtube videos on our screens.

In earlier threads I've discussed aspects of this subject from several different angles, particularly the militarization of what, fifteen or twenty years ago was really nothing more than a hobbyists toy - the idea of using packets to knock others offline. Back in those days our arsenals were metaphorically equal to six shooters. What exists today, in the form of large scale botnets, are more like digital nukes.

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