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Cybersecurity
What is DDoS Attack?
Quick answer
Distributed Denial of Service: an attack that floods a website or network with traffic from many sources to make it unavailable.
DDoS Attack, explained
In a DDoS attack, an attacker uses many machines, often a botnet of compromised devices, to send overwhelming amounts of traffic or requests to a target. Legitimate users then experience slowdowns or cannot connect at all.
Attacks come in several types. Volumetric attacks try to saturate bandwidth, protocol attacks exhaust server or firewall resources, and application-layer attacks send seemingly normal requests, such as repeated page loads, that are expensive for the server to handle. Motives include extortion, activism, distraction from other intrusions, or simple disruption. Mitigation usually relies on specialized DDoS protection services, content delivery networks with large capacity, rate limiting, and traffic filtering that separates bots from real visitors.
Related terms
Botnet
A network of compromised computers or devices controlled remotely by an attacker, often used for spam, fraud, or DDoS attacks.
Content Delivery NetworkA geographically distributed network of servers that delivers web content from locations close to each user to improve speed.
Rate LimitingRestricting how many requests a user, device, or application can make to a service within a set time period.
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