A favourite tool of hackers and other forms of online troublemaker, the DDOS - Distributed Denial of Service - attack is something we see a lot of in video games, whether it be people trying to take down a company's website or even, in some cases, crash the games themselves.
But just how does a DDOS attack work? Many know that, basically, a DDOS attack is when, as Motherboard so perfectly puts it, "computers send a boatload of traffic to a site's servers until they break".
Which makes sense, but it's not until you see it happening that you get an idea of how powerful these attacks can be. In these videos you can see a visualisation of a server handling visits to a website, all in the style of a game of Pong.
Created by VLC developer Ludovic Fauvet, the top one shows regular sever traffic. The visits come in, and the server's "paddle" is able to meet them. The video below, though, shows a DDOS attack underway.
And the paddle is on fire.
Understand How DDoS Attacks Work with These Cool Visualizations [Motherboard]