flood
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)