One of the problems with movies is that while they can show us breathtaking beauty, action and philosophy  when it comes to technology, it needs to keep things simple enough for everyone to understand. But beyond that, it needs to be entertaining. That's why with every single hacking movie ever, we see fancy visual effects instead of a command prompt being diligently tapped away at, or a specific software tool being run before the hacker leans back and relaxes. It doesn't have to be this way though: if anyone is looking to showcase DDOS attacks in a movie, this isn't a bad way to go about it.

This Youtube video from the VLC guys, shows off what a DDOS attack looks like if interpreted by logstalgia (a tool for showing website access logs as a visualisation) and it's easy to understand, looks good and actually makes sense too. [yframe url='http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNjdBSoIa8k']

The coloured dots streaming in from the left are the IP address requests for site access. The tight stream of particles are those coming from the attacking botnet, while the random bouncing ones are from legitimate traffic; the latter of which is not being served by the pong like paddle of the server – as it simply can't get away from the mass of requests from the DDOS'ers.

KitGuru Says: The only real thing missing here is some sort of epic sound track. Anyone got a good suggestion?

[Cheers Kotaku]

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