Everyone loves it when lots of traffic comes through their website. In fact, many do whatever they can to achieve that traffic in hopes that someone will find what is on their site interesting and will make a purchase from the site. That’s the idea, right? Of course it is, but it is a fact that traffic of all types may not be very beneficial if it isn’t targeted traffic. However, there are ways in which traffic is brought to sites and two of these are DOS Attack and Digg Traffic. There are actual differences between the two as far as how they bring traffic to websites. Let’s just say that one is more vicious than the other.

DOS Attack

Dos Attack makes the web server beg for mercy because it is flooded with traffic that can actually be considered useless. There are different kinds of DOS Attacks such as Teardrop and Ping of Death. What these do is exploit the limitations of the TCP/IP protocols. However, there are software fixes that administrators administer to their systems to reduce the damage that is done by DOS Attacks. But just like computer viruses, there are always new attacks being created by hackers.

What these attacks do is keep the website from functioning properly and usually target large sites such as those of banks and credit card sites. The Teardrop attack sends IP fragments with huge payloads that are overlapping to the machine that they are targeting. Many operating systems are vulnerable to this type of attack and can crash the entire system.

There is also an attack called the Smurf Attack in which it floods the internet by sending packets of information to be sent to the computer hosts on a certain network. This is one of those methods in which it appears a website is receiving a lot of traffic, but none of the traffic is legitimate. SYN Flood is another that floods the servers to appear as legitimate traffic.

Digg Traffic

Digg is actually a legitimate way to generate traffic to websites. It is community-based and uses articles to gain traffic. It combines blogging, social bookmarking, and syndication with editorial control by the users. Websites and news stories are submitted by the users and a user-based ranking system is used to promote the website. It can happen that the web server is not prepared to manage that high incoming traffic and ultimately crashes the site for a short time.

However, Digg has met some controversy because it is said the users have entirely too much control over the content. There are even users who have been accused of operating what is called a “Bury Brigade” in which users mark articles as SPAM, which can bury these legitimate stories under the ones that users want to promote, whether they are legitimate or not.

The differences

The differences are rather clean in that DOS attacks are a way in which hackers maliciously flood systems with fake traffic and can actually disable use of a website. It is not a legitimate way to gain traffic, whereas Digg is a legitimate method. However, even Digg has met its controversy in which traffic can be directed away from legitimate articles due to “Bury Brigades,” which can hinder one’s ability to promote through Digg’s system. Yet as with any system on the internet, there are always ways to compromise its original intent and Digg is not an exception. DOS Attacks, on the other hand, still do what they are intended to do and that is to maliciously attack the web.

By: Amy Nutt