Date: October 19th, 2010 7:14 PM Author: flatulent misanthropic step-uncle's house rigpig
No, they find one or two of the largest files on the server and instruct the botnet to download it repeatedly. Pings are small and can be easily ignored, but when you're accessing a legitimate file or files as a normal user does, it becomes either take down the site or pay for massive bandwidth and hardware charges from your host to keep the site up under the increased load.