See how beautiful a DDoS attack can look

We've all heard of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack and know what it is: when a person or people attempt to take down a Web site by flooding it with connection requests. These max out the site's bandwidth, making it unable to accept new requests. The attacks are usually automated and can be accomplished in a variety of ways. The loss of traffic during the attack itself, and the recovery afterward, can end up costing Web sites quite a lot.

But what does that actually look like? Well, nothing by itself; but thanks to a Web site traffic visualization tool called Logstalgia, Ludovic Fauvet, developer of the Web site VideoLAN (which created and distributes the free multimedia player VLC), managed to capture an April 23 DDoS attack on his site.