Low Orbit Ion Cannon
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DoS/DDoS
DoS is an acronym that stands for "Denial of Service," and is often classified as a cyber attack. When a user attempts to visit a website, www.google.com(*link*) for example, they are making a request to that page for information (ask for information that is stored in Google's servers to be loaded on the user's browser). The concept behind DoSing is that malicious attackers can continually send these HTTP(*link*) requests to a website, and overload the site's capability to process all of the requests. If the attacker is able to achieve a sufficient threshold of requests, the site may "shut down" and be unable to process requests made by any user. This is where the attack coins its name as once the site is down, users that attempt to access the site are denied service to that page.
DDoS stands for "Distributed Denial of Service," and refers to a combined effort of multiple machines attempting to shut down (DoS) a site.
Anonymous
Project Chanology
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Ethical Implications
Pros:
- stress testing websites' abilities to handle large numbers of requests at a time
- upholding First Amendment
- uniting tech community/hackers
Cons:
- DDoSing a given website and "taking it down"
- incentivizing creation of BotNets