Distributed Preservation of Service

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A Distributed Preservation of Service (DPoS) is an act similar to a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, with the difference that the purpose of the latter is rendering a service unavailable, thus causing harm, while the point of DPoS is quite the opposite: to preserve, if not the service, but at least its content, for future presentation, analyzation, or for other purposes.

The term was introduced by ArchiveTeam founder Jason Scott in his 2011 Defcon presentation titled ARCHIVE TEAM: A Distributed Preservation of Service Attack.

In fact, it means plain web archiving, but from several differently geolocated points at the same time, that is what distributed in the phrase means.

ArchiveTeam has set up a distributed archiving toolkit, which consists of

  • a tracker,
  • staging servers for temporary storage of archived data,
  • custom scripts for different projects,
  • and optionally a virtual machine appliance called Warrior that makes joining the DPoS operation easier.

ArchiveTeam often uses the phrase warrior project – those are all DPoS's. Sometimes, however, the Warrior is not used, but only the scripts: in those cases we can only say that it's a DPoS project.