are denial of service attacks actually illegal?

[statman]

If so, how illegal? Why is there no civil disobedience just shutting the whole healthcare.gov site down from the outside?

If someone somewhere would post code showing how to turn anyone's home PC into a spambot to take down ocare website, I'm sure there would be a couple thousand people in perpetuity who would run the code. I could foresee enough people doing it that there's nothing they could do it keep the site up and no way to do anything against the thousands of people doing the attacking.

Our own little cyber day of rage...

[chrisrenrut]

If so, how illegal? Why is there no civil disobedience just shutting the whole healthcare.gov site down from the outside?

If someone somewhere would post code showing how to turn anyone's home PC into a spambot to take down ocare website, I'm sure there would be a couple thousand people in perpetuity who would run the code. I could foresee enough people doing it that there's nothing they could do it keep the site up and no way to do anything against the thousands of people doing the attacking.

Our own little cyber day of rage...

There are ways around DDOS attacks. Large US banks have been battling them for more than a year. The federal government has been assisting them.

I would assume the DOJ would be on the doorstep of any citizen participating in something like that in no time.

[il Padrino Ute]

The geniuses in this administration don't need any help screwing up that website. They've done just fine on their own.

[lambdacoug]

If so, how illegal? Why is there no civil disobedience just shutting the whole healthcare.gov site down from the outside?

If someone somewhere would post code showing how to turn anyone's home PC into a spambot to take down ocare website, I'm sure there would be a couple thousand people in perpetuity who would run the code. I could foresee enough people doing it that there's nothing they could do it keep the site up and no way to do anything against the thousands of people doing the attacking.

Our own little cyber day of rage...

Yes, DDoS attacks are illegal in the US. They were made so under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. IANAL though, so take what I say with an even bigger grain of salt than usual. Botnets are bought and sold on the black market for exactly this purpose. It is not impossible that your machine is part of a botnet right now and you have no clue and you anti-malware software is equally ignorant to it, especially if you are using a Windows operating system. Unix/Linux machines (and therefore Mac OSX devices) are more resilient, but not immune.

[lambdacoug]

There are ways around DDOS attacks. Large US banks have been battling them for more than a year. The government has assisting them. I would assume the DOJ would be on the doorstep of any citizen participating in something like that in no time.

There are many ways to defend against a DDoS, but there are just as many ways to counter those defenses. It is very much an arms race. Every so often major sites will be hit hard by a DDoS. The last one I remember was an attack on github about a month or so ago and within the last year sites like AWS and Google have been hit with DDoS attacks. You probably only experienced slowness from those sites, not a complete denial of service, though. Such is the arms race.