Many of the Web sites we visit every day are under cyber attack by malicious hackers looking to disrupt business transactions, discourage people from using a particular online service or exact payback for some real or perceived slight. One of the most common ways to bring down a site is to flood its computer servers with so much traffic, they slow to a crawl or shut down because they simply can’t handle the volume. This is known as a denial-of-service (DOS) attack.
Image: Courtesy of Scientific American
To read the original article: How Hackers Take Down Web Sites [Video] | Observations, Scientific American Blog Network
