What Are Denial Of Service Attacks?

In short, ‘denial of service’ (DOS) and ‘distributed denial of service’ (DDOS) attacks, make a resource unavailable for the people who want to use it. It’s commonly used in a computing/cyberspace/security setting.

Let’s say Alice and Bob want to use Twitter, and Chuck wants to keep them from using it. If Chuck was really skilled, he’d hack into the system and simply shut Twitter’s servers off. Now Alice and Bob can’t use Twitter — they’ve been DOS’ed. If Twitter’s servers were impenetrable, Chuck could gather his army of bad guys and have them all do a bunch of things on Twitter simultaneously, hoping to cause a Fail Whale. If successful, they would’ve done a DDOS, since the attack was distributed (not just one person/machine, but a whole army of them).

I learned the basics of this a while back, in one of my classes in university about computer security. But recently I started wondering about DOS and DDOS in real life. Are these types of attacks a possibility in meatspace?

In Real Life

A little while ago there was this kerfuffle (discussion on HN) between Black Car services Uber and Gett. In a gist, Uber employees ordered and cancelled 100’s of Gett cars in a matter of days. Although the reason was to get the drivers’ phone numbers and try to recruit them, the 100’s of cancellations also took the drivers away from serving legitimate customers. Denial of service. In real life.

What’s stopping a rival taxi company from calling for cabs that belong to their competitors, so that they’ll be the only available taxis when legitimate customers need them? I guess it being unethical stops them from doing this. Or who knows? Maybe this does go on. But being unethical doesn’t stop cyber hackers from causing DOS and DDOS attacks on the internet.

A Far-Fetched Example Involving Pizza

Suppose there are only 2 pizzerias in town, Alice’s Pizza and Bob’s Cheesy Crust. Any stakeholders in Alice’s could gather all their friends and family, and have them call up Bob’s to make orders. Bob’s hands would be full from making pies. Unable to take in any more new orders, any legitimate customers wanting cheesy crust from Bob’s wouldn’t be able to get it. DOS’ed. If they still want pizza, they’d have to go to Alice’s.

What makes this possible, is that most pizzerias take orders over the phone, but don’t require any guarantee that you’ll pick it up and pay. This probably doesn’t happen in real life, but it is possible. Again, who knows? This could actually be going on behind the scenes. But who would want that? All it takes is some new, rogue pizzeria to open up whose owner is an ex-hacker. We’d be left with a town full of surplus pizza pies…