PBJ DDoS: A FAQ

At the GNU Public Dictatorship we are nothing if not pleased that our supporters have been submitting many questions about the PBJ DDoS, which is why we have decided to take the time to publish this FAQ for you.  If you don't find an answer to your question here, please contact us or your local GPD office.

Q. What is a PBJ DDoS attack?  Does it have to do with peanut butter and jelly?

A.  Unfortunately there is no peanut butter or jelly involved in a PBJ DDoS, which stands for Paper-Based Junkmail Distributed Denial-of-Service attack.

Q. What is the goal of a DoS attack?

A. The idea in any Denial-of-Service attack is to keep some person or organization from providing its legitimate services by overwhelming its service mechanism.  This sort of attack has often been used about companies' websites.

Q. How does a DoS attack work?

A. A simple Denial-of-Service attack is much like a two-year-old constantly saying "Mom!" every few seconds.  After several hours of this behavior the mother is usually so stressed out that she just ignores legitimate requests from the two-year-old or from others.  It can be easily solved, however, by putting the child down for a nap.  In network terms, a simple Denial-of-Service attack can be easily blocked by ignoring requests from a certain requester.

Q. How does a DDoS attack work?

A. A Distributed Denial-of-Service attack is more like a group of two-year-old children at a daycare all yelling for attention at once.  The primary difference here is that the effort required to stop the attack is much greater, as putting fifteen children down for a nap is much harder than putting a single child to bed.

Q. How does a PBJ DDoS attack work?

A.  Most DDoS attacks currently target websites or network infrastructure.  A Paper-Based Junkmail Distributed Denial-of-Service attack targets the physical mail infrastructure of an individual or organization.  While ignoring a few pieces of junkmail every day is a reasonable thing to do, ignoring 400,000 pieces of junkmail crafted to look like legitimate correspondence every day requires many more resources.

Q. Why did it take so long to recover from this massive PBJ DDoS attack?

A. The success of this most recent attack comes from several factors:

1. It was unprecedented.  Nobody in the field had even considered mounting this sort of attack due to its massive cost.
2. It was massive.  The quantity of mail received over the entire attack was extremely large.  While it started slowly to not arouse suspicion it soon became apparent that the attack was so large that we would have to shut our public-facing doors and clean up after the attack.  We have contingency plans for this sort of shutdown, so our operatives were able to keep the New Company in check in the meantime, but we were unable to bring our presence to bear on the problems facing the world.
3. It was sustained.  The attack lasted for several months.

At the GPD we are nothing if not disappointed with our response, which is why we have implemented protocols to prevent this sort of attack from succeeding in the future!