Someone sabotaged the Black Internet network last night and it has just begun to recover. Their entire infrastructure was down and a lot of customers (including my office) were left without any Internet connection until just a couple of hours ago. Feels kind of scary that retaliators could make so much damage so quickly.
Well you've got to consider how many computers are on the internet and how much bandwidth a server is capable of handling. IPv4 is being replaced because it's running out of addresses, and there's estimated to be far more computers than currently available IP addresses; we have about 7 devices with an IP in my house, but we still only have 1 IP address as we only have one modem.
So imagine if all 4 billion computers on the face of the planet requested 1 byte of data from one server. That server would need at least 4 gigabytes/second bandwidth, likely higher, to cope. This can, in theory, be done with a DRDoS attack. This scales quite considerably, considering I have about 1MB/S up-stream bandwidth. If every computer in the world transmitted 1 megabyte of legitimate data requests to a server, its fiber connection would likely melt as it would be hitting 4 petabytes of data.
DDoS attacks usually use fake packets to clog up the server, which then it usually doesn't require too much effort to crash a computer. I'm sure with the 3.6 million registered users that even a small percentage taking part in a DDoS attack could easily take down a server and that's without counting on the use of botnets and such.
The internet works like a bridge; the traffic only runs quickly when there's no congestion in the toll booths. If people start getting out their cars and arguing with the person in the toll booths (fake data packets) it won't take long before you've got delays, which then it won't take long until the traffic comes to a complete halt, which is the time you pray the bridge doesn't collapse! Servers are usually reset after a DDoS and business carries on as usual, however I'm sure that's not always the case.
