flood

chat On a real-time network (whether at the level of

TCP/IP, or at the level of, say, IRC), to send a huge

amount of data to another user (or a group of users, in a

channel) in an attempt to annoy him, lock his terminal, or to

overflow his network buffer and thus lose his network

connection.

The basic principles of flooding are that you should have

better network bandwidth than the person you're trying to

flood, and that what you do to flood them (e.g., generate ping

requests) should be *less* resource-expensive for your machine

to produce than for the victim's machine to deal with. There

is also the corrolary that you should avoid being caught.

Failure to follow these principles regularly produces

hilarious results, e.g., an IRC user flooding himself off the

network while his intended victim is unharmed, the attacker's

flood attempt being detected, and him being banned from the

network in semi-perpetuity.

See also pingflood, clonebot and botwar.

[Jargon File]

(1997-04-07)