This isn't so much some news, as something that I thought was worth reading. You will no doubt recall the well publicised "Distributed Denial of Service Attacks " on the Internet's Root Name Servers recently? If not, try reading this.

Anyway, you may be wondering just what on Earth a "Distributed Denial of Service Attack" actually is... Well, I've just finished a fascinating read here which pretty much breaks down the situation into digestable chunks....

"The DoS concept is easily applied to the networked world. Routers and servers can handle a finite amount of traffic at any given time based on factors such as hardware performance, memory and bandwidth. If this limit or rate is surpassed, new requests will be rejected. As a result, legitimate traffic will be ignored and the object's users will be denied access. So, an attacker who wishes to disrupt a specific service or device can do so by simply overwhelming the target with packets designed to consume all available resources.... A DDoS can be thought of as an advanced form of a traditional DoS attack. Instead of one attacker flooding a target with traffic, numerous machines are used in a "master-slave", multi-tiered configuration....."

A really good read here from Security Focus Online which will answer a lot of your questions about DDoS.

Wanna discuss the article or anything about DDoS attacks? Post a comment here. Just don't ask how to do them because we are not telling you.