How Denial of Service Works 3 enough of the available resources (land, diamond production, or any resource your competition needs) to disrupt or starve others. In general, this requires deep pockets or significant resources, which makes it much less likely to occur than DoS attacks in the virtual world. Distributed Denial of Service To conduct a successful DoS attack, you usually need a lot of help. This is the origin of the distributed denial of service attack (DDoS). As an example of a DDoS attack for the physical world, consider the following: you admire the cool-headed reasoned approach of Captain Picard over the random cowboy style of Captain Kirk, and decide that what the world needs is a statue of Picard in San Francisco, the (future) home of Starfleet. To this end, you start a campaign to raise money, and people begin sending you checks. Sadly your "friend" Mike does not agree and makes his mission to stop you. He recruits friends to send you hate mail, and soon your mailbox is stuffed with angry letters about why Kirk is better than Picard. Sorting through the mail takes longer and longer, and you only find a few checks in every batch of letters. Soon you've got friends involved to sort the mail, but sending the same angry letter multiple times