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What is DDoS?
- Authors
- Name
- Skip2 Networks
- Title
- Content Manager
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS)
DDoS, or Distributed Denial of Service, is a malicious cyberattack tactic designed to disrupt the normal traffic of a targeted server, service, or network by overwhelming it with a flood of internet traffic. Unlike a traditional DoS attack that originates from a single source, a DDoS attack utilizes multiple compromised computer systems – often referred to as a "botnet" – as sources for the attack traffic. These botnets, consisting of machines infected with malware and controlled remotely by an attacker, can generate an immense volume of requests, packets, or other malicious data simultaneously.
The sheer volume of this illegitimate traffic saturates the target's bandwidth or exhausts its system resources, making it unable to process legitimate requests and effectively rendering the service unavailable to its intended users. DDoS attacks vary in sophistication and target different layers of the network stack, from overwhelming network infrastructure with raw data (volumetric attacks) to exploiting vulnerabilities in application-layer protocols.