DDOS

or what kiddiots do when they feel uhm, what?

What is DDos?

Distributed Denial Of Service, using many compromised hosts combined to launch attacks to one or more victims, causing so much traffic that the victim can't use his connection.

What can/should providers do?

What can a user do to protect himself?

There's not much one can do to protect against ddos attacks, but least one can do is make sure the system is secure. Have a good firewall and a system that logs scans.
Packet kiddies scan networks to find machines they can abuse for their attacks. Always report incidents to either your ISP or the ISP of the one scanning. Even logs of a ddos attack are not totally useless, they might show which kiddo was attacking, bases on pattern and hosts that were spoofed. Even irc logs can be relevant/useful, especially for crossreference.
More about protecting yourself.

Relevant links

What does Chello/UPC do about it?

Why bother

A while ago on #linux channel on IrcNet we banned someone from the channel, for being dns spammer (having a non-rfc hostname, as described in RFC1178): (AnnihilaT [Gravity@screw.you.guys.im.going-home.nl]). Within moments, the following happened: this guy called for "assistance", and all channel ops were ddossed out. Read this log for the stuff that happened. Torn and annihilat were obviously the ones responsible, so i checked annihilats host's domain registration, which brought me to bevelander. I mailed to abuse@bevelander.nl. A few minutes later, this annihilat pasted my mail in the channel, so next problem: he's admin there. More research showed that www.warlords.nl pointed to the bevelander website. Warlords is a group of irc "war" kiddies, who will stop at nothing to "protect" or "take over" a channel. I've had contact with bevelander and his "admin" ( joshua dodds, aka josh DDos ). Bevelander thinks there's not a problem, so much for that, he probably plays the same games. I also got a faked (by same j.ddos) mail from martijn bevelander, claiming a host was compromised and abused for the ddos attack. Pretty lame excuse, since the same bevelander said in an interview "he can't be hacked". We know this excuse is nonsense anyway, since no attacking host was identified, all i had was a PERSON (annihilat). These days we all know Bevelander is an ex-warez kiddo, and trying to get rich by domainsquatting (reserving domainnames, hoping to sell them later) and using his fathers connections, so it's pointless to try to hold him responsible for behaviour of his employees, it's what he hires them for. Lots more not-so-positive articles about this guy on several dutch (news)sites.
Official complaints so far have had no effect, but the least i can do is try to warn others about these kids.

Several incidents followed, i'll put info online in due time.