Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Attack

A DDoS attack uses many compromised hosts (a botnet), open reflectors, or rented stresser/booter services to flood a victim with traffic or requests from many sources at once, making it hard to filter and easy to overwhelm capacity. Attacks span layers: volumetric attacks fill links (often via amplification), protocol attacks exhaust stateful devices like firewalls or load balancers, and application-layer attacks target costly endpoints with apparently legitimate requests. DDoS is commonly used for extortion, hacktivism, competitive sabotage, or as cover for other intrusions. Mitigation relies on high-capacity scrubbing networks, anycast, on-prem and cloud DDoS protection services, behaviour-based rate limiting, and well-rehearsed incident playbooks.