Thoughts on Online Flooding

Flood is a forceful surge that damages the things blocking its path. If a river overflows with water, it destroys bridges, roadways, houses, and farms. If the Internet overflows with information, it kicks out an online client from the communication line, consumes connection speed, or causes a computer server to bug down.

People can easily understand or may have experienced how harmful natural flooding can be. However, not everybody knows what a bandwidth-flooding attack is. It compromises sources by sending high-volume of information or traffic to the recipient with the intention to cause congestion in its tail circuit and disruption to legitimate communications. Online flooding exhausts the bandwidth of servers and cause network latency or lag, which annoys users. It is mostly done by sending data faster than a recipient's ability to receive it.

There are different kinds of online flood, the most common are crap, message, invite, nick, and connect floods. Crap flood refers to posting of large amounts of data or one very long post of repetitive text simply by copying and pasting. Message flood means sending large volume of private messages to a single recipient through the use of multiple connections or clones, causing lots of message windows to pop up on the recipient's screen. Invite flood is done by sending several invitations to one recipient. Nick flood is the frequent changing of nickname, making the conversation non-enjoyable for the user. Connect flood refers to the frequent connecting and disconnecting from the server, spamming the channel with connect and disconnect messages. Flooding cannot only be done in Internet relay chats (IRCs), but also threaded e-mails. For many users, it is a form of spamming, where Internet clients are served with useless messages.

To prevent online flooding, IRC programs automatically limit the number of characters users can send at one time. If a user sends voluminous private messages, notices, invites, or requests, the recipient can still be protected from flooding. The number of messages sent by the user will trigger the server's protection limit and disconnect him or her.

Online flooding, being a form of Internet abuse, is disastrous and illegal. To avoid harm, install a firewall, filter e-mails, block the user, or report attackers to the operators of the IRC or e-mail. At best, go to a different communication channel, where there are no attackers.

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