The simple approach to DOS is to flood a server with a large amount of pointless traffic. This gives the server far too much to deal with. Bandwidth escalates, memory is exhausted and ordinary users can’t get a connection to the server. DDoS stands for But actually maxing out a server can be quite difficult, even with a large number of computers opening up as many connections as they can. As such, attackers have come up with a way to magnify the effect by using fake IP addresses. Using fake IPs, the same process can be carried out by one computer, a botnet that’s controlled by one master or, as with Operation Payback, a group of people working together. Here’s what happens. The attacking machine sends a SYN packet to the server. However, it makes it appear to come from somewhere else. The server then responds with a SYN/ACK packet, but there’s no response – the sender address was fake. The server continues to wait for a reply, keeping the connection open and in its memory...