The continuous port scans, the worm traffic, the DDoS attacks, have to be winnowed down to something actionable.

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The group's members employed techniques to flood websites with high traffic - known as DDoS attacks - in order to render them unusable.

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Cory Doctorow has recently written a thought-provoking piece for Make about the nature of distributed denial of service (DDoS, flooding a website with illegitimate traffic to cause it to crash) as a form of political protest.

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DDoS attacks involve flooding a website with more traffic than it can handle, therefore knocking it offline.

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In late 2010, Anonymous grabbed headlines for launching so-called DDoS attacks on PayPal and MasterCard, spamming them with junk traffic which (largely thanks to botnets) knocked them temporarily offline.

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The attackers have used a tactic known as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), which floods the intended target with large amounts of traffic in an attempt to render it unreachable.

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This so-called Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack relies on having enough users, voluntary or not, to flood a site with so much traffic that it gets shunted offline.

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Those DDoS attacks consisted of a large number of computers, usually organized into a bot-net, launching as much traffic as they could towards the intended victim.

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