On Thu, 31 Jan 2002, Daniel Golding wrote: :So, this is thinly veiled hacking, in the name of protest. Very nice. I :hope the folks doing this realize that this is no different than throwing a :brick through a window, or otherwise damaging people's property, and that :they are essentially vandals. It's not quite that simple. The more organized version of this sort of thing was organized by a single group who provided a tool (floodnet) which just requests the targets website over and over. Same principle as an old fashioned sit-in or other 'flood the jails' tactics which are based on exhausting civic resources. The targets rely on, and thus are part of, the larger Internet infrastrucure, which must bear the weight of the confrontation. A regular DDoS (icmp, UDP, other) would probably come from one or two crackers acting alone, or maybe a small team who operate independently of any political action group. They would unleash the DDoS because the political climate offered an opportune time to play with their zombie network, by taking advantage of the confusion. Treat it like you would any other DDoS, bearing in mind that it is more likely to be the same people DDoS'ing as it would any other time. "Traditional" DDoS'ing isn't consistant with the real goals of any activist group I've heard of, including the ones who are blamed for confrontations with police. It's grim that there is such a thing as 'traditional' ddos though.