How Syrnia was knocked offline

We was told it was a DDoS attack that caused Syrnia to go down. In fact this was not correct, technically it was a simple DoS attack. What is the difference?

A DDoS is a Distributed Denial of Service which means many computers (Zombies) and their connections are used to flood a server and cause its service to be unusable. In most case the service is the webserver but it is not limited to this. The main point is the Distributed part which means many hacked computers take part. This is not limited to just exhausting all the servers bandwidth.

So a denial of service can be caused with just one computer, making it just a DoS.

So how was Syrnia knocked offline? With a simple Perl script made of up only a few lines of code, only one of those lines really needed. Someone on dialup could have done this.

Syrnia was running a vulnerable version of Lighttp daemon at the time.

The Lighttpd Server 1.4.23 Remote Denial of Service Exploit runs if you have Perl installed, its as simple as copying the code to notepad and typing: Perl nice.pl www.syrnia.com 80

Four words and Syrnia instantly went offline. No botnets needed, just one person on one pc.