this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2025
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Explain Like I'm Five
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Doxxing and DDOSing are two separate things. Doxxing is exposing someone's personal information, such as home address, phone number, etc., often with the intent of targeted harassment against that person.
DDOS, which stands for distributed denial of service, is typically used, as you said, to bring down a website or other online service by flooding the server(s) with traffic until it cannot respond to any requests in a timely fashion, making the service inaccessible.
Technically, you're just describing any DOS attack. The specific characteristic of a DDOS attack is the distribution, i.e. using a botnet to send traffic from thousands of different ip addresses simoultaneously, which makes DDOS attacks far harder to block than a simple DOS attack, originating from a single IP.