Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) is a type of cyber attack that is used to make an online service unavailable by flooding it with requests from multiple sources. It is a type of attack that attempts to make a service, such as a website or other network resource, unavailable to its intended users.
In a distributed denial of service attack, a large number of computers are used to generate large quantities of traffic to overwhelm the target system. The attacking computers are infected with a network of nefarious software called a “botnet”. Once a botnet is initiated by its controller, it will initiate requests from each computer/server/zarod-slave member of the network in an attempt to consume all available bandwidth or computing resources from the target system. The attack will last until there is no longer an available resource or until the attack is terminated by the controller.
DDoS attacks can be used in different ways and its most frequent use is as a political statement, called hacktivism. A common method of carrying out such an attack is to hijack a number of computers with a malicious virus, thus creating a botnet, and then launch the attack from each of these computers in order to overwhelm the target.
Organizations around the world often deploy defense mechanisms through third-party services or their own security practices in order to mitigate the effects of a DDoS attack. By utilizing things such as firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and internet service providers (ISPs) to filter incoming traffic, a system can be less likely to experience a DDoS attack.
DDoS attacks have become increasingly common in recent years. In October 2020, a major distributed denial of service attack on the internet infrastructure caused temporary outages for websites around the world, creating an initial internet blackout.
