Life, universe, and everything else
The servers of Telegram, a popular instant messenger, were under a DDoS attack recently. While they were working on the problem, they’ve tweeted a couple of explanations of what’s going on. CNET brings those tweets to our attention, as they explain rather complex things in a very short and simple way.
A DDoS is a “Distributed Denial of Service attack”: your servers get GADZILLIONS of garbage requests which stop them from processing legitimate requests. Imagine that an army of lemmings just jumped the queue at McDonald’s in front of you – and each is ordering a whopper. (1/2)
— Telegram Messenger (@telegram) June 12, 2019
The server is busy telling the whopper lemmings they came to the wrong place – but there are so many of them that the server can’t even see you to try and take your order. (2/2)
— Telegram Messenger (@telegram) June 12, 2019
To generate these garbage requests, bad guys use “botnets” made up of computers of unsuspecting users which were infected with malware at some point in the past. This makes a DDoS similar to the zombie apocalypse: one of the whopper lemmings just might be your grandpa.
— Telegram Messenger (@telegram) June 12, 2019
There’s a bright side: All of these lemmings are there just to overload the servers with extra work – they can’t take away your BigMac and coke. Your data is safe.
— Telegram Messenger (@telegram) June 12, 2019