Okay, so it looks like a number of people want to get into the weeds in analyzing this analogy, so let’s do it: People need to get places, so car traffic has a legitimate function, whereas DDoS traffic is entirely useless, right?
But cars don’t need to get places, only people do.
There’s some overhead in IP packets, not all of the data sent over the network is payload. It’s kept to a minimum. Perhaps we could say that a packet is like using a 10kg bicycle to move an 80kg rider. But what about using a 2,200kg vehicle to move that person? It’s like using IP packets with 27kB of headers for each 1kB of data! If lots of users hit a server with a data stream like that, and bring it to its knees, that sounds a lot like a DDoS. If that users know in advance that it’s going to bring down the server, how’s that not a DDoS?
Okay, so it looks like a number of people want to get into the weeds in analyzing this analogy, so let’s do it: People need to get places, so car traffic has a legitimate function, whereas DDoS traffic is entirely useless, right?
But cars don’t need to get places, only people do.
There’s some overhead in IP packets, not all of the data sent over the network is payload. It’s kept to a minimum. Perhaps we could say that a packet is like using a 10kg bicycle to move an 80kg rider. But what about using a 2,200kg vehicle to move that person? It’s like using IP packets with 27kB of headers for each 1kB of data! If lots of users hit a server with a data stream like that, and bring it to its knees, that sounds a lot like a DDoS. If that users know in advance that it’s going to bring down the server, how’s that not a DDoS?