Yes, as opposed to a non-malicious one.

The best example off the top of my head was a D-Link firmware update which added an NTP server operated by a third party for "public use." This wound up increasing the NTP server's traffic by 90% and costing them over $8K/year in additional bandwidth fees. See [1].

Then you have so called "slashdotting." Or linking to a small web-site with an interesting story and overloading it with legitimate traffic until it goes down. See [2].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTP_server_misuse_and_abuse#D-L...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_effect

Getting a slashdotting is not a "DDOS attack" under any definition although the practical consequence is the same. If the resulting traffic overload is caused by a (massive) router-configuration error or similar mishaps, it's also by definition not an attack.

Sorry about being picky around semantics, but still: No point in throwing words around to the point where they become completely pointless.

Well ... It's definitely a DDOS but you're right about the attack part.

There is no inherent requirement that attacks need to be intentional. It's possible for a software glitch to launch a missile attack. Attack: An aggressive and violent action against a person or place

Non-malicious DDOS attacks might be considered those where the traffic is genuine, like a normal website reaching the frontpage of reddit or hn.

By definition, DDOS, are malicious no? Otherwise, the site is just having high traffic that it cannot handle. If my blog goes down after being on the front page of HN, is that a DDOS?

I think it's more the term "attack" that indicates maliciousness.

Getting Slashdotted or Hacker Newsed is definitely a distributed denial of service, but it's not so much an attack

By definition: "[DDos] is an attempt to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users.". When I see "DDoS" I always thought it was malicious...

I don't think it's appropriate to use the DDoS acronym when not referring to an "attack". It's non-standard and will only create confusion. Every "source" online describing a DDoS uses it explicitly to refer to an attack.

Was Service Denied? Was the cause Distributed?

Non malicious DDOS happen all the time, but mostly reddit does it to other small sites that people discover and reddit ends up overwhelming the servers. Still technically a DDOS, but non malicious. Also during Obama AMA, site was in shambles because of itself.

I heard someone describe a non-malicious DDOS attack (in the case of high traffic) as a website being cuddled to death.

People sometimes make mistakes. If those people create and distribute consumer level routers those mistakes can be severe.

(http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~plonka/netgear-sntp/)

"Typical HN Top-poster - up in arms about one point they care about, misses entire point of article."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4780475

Don't confuse missing the point of the article with not caring about the rest of the article.

I had a chuckle too about "malicious". A DDoS attack is a DDoS attack. It's like hearing about a "malicious stabbing."

But whatever, there are DDoS attacks every day on someone.

I took the "malicious" as being "severe" so didn't really find the wording redundant.