Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-168424-20151004232302/@comment-1757994-20151009070656

AgentMuffin wrote: whatever the word is for that then

DoS = denial of service DDoS = distributed denial of service

DDoS means a distributed network of attackers (botnets, etc.) overwhelm a site with traffic. There are lots of DoS attacks that are elegant enough not to require a legion of infected home users (e.g., SYN flooding). But botnets are the tools of kiddies, so DDoS is the term some people learn first and associate (incorrectly) with all malicious activity.

Wikia got hacked, not DoS'ed or DDoS'ed, because the attacks came from inside their systems from compromised accounts. Hacked is just hacked, nothing else.