If you had never heard of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack before, after last week’s assault that hobbled Twitter, Netflix and other networks you would know how dangerous it can be. A DDoS assault is one of the ways to bring a website down, sending millions of requests to the server so that it gets overloaded and just stops letting anyone through. It sounds very much like a science fiction movie — because sci-fi often uses technology the average Johan or Jabu has never heard of — but it is all too dangerously real. Instead of attacking sites such as Twitter, Netflix, Amazon, Spotify and Reddit directly, last Friday’s onslaught targeted a company called Dyn, which provides domain name server registries, kind of like the telephone book for servers on the Internet. The terrible influence DDoS attacks have on news organisations, and therefore on freedom of speech, was the subject of a scary presentation by George Conard at the Media Party Africa on the day this attack becam...
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