What is a DDoS Attack?

“DDoS” is the acronym for distributed denial-of-service. A distributed denial of service attack means an attempt to disrupt the normal traffic in a particular/targeted server by making a huge number of requests from various computers and causing massive traffic in that targeted server to cause service interruption.

These attacks achieve success by destroying service to normal users through directing huge traffic from compromised multiple computers or different network devices such as IoT devices.

For example, when you are going for a trip on vacation, and suddenly you stop at a point due to a huge traffic jam consisting of cars lined up for miles on that road, you check your GPS, and there’s no way out!

So, standing cars are the flooded requests made by the attacker, and you are the normal user unable to use the service (here, in a sense, the road).

So that explains what is a DDoS attack. Now let’s see how this kind of attack works.

How Does a DDoS Attack Work?

DDoS attacks are mainly carried out by compromised devices consisting of computers, mobile phones, network devices, IoT devices etc. These compromised devices are called bots, and a network comprising of these bots, called a botnet, is single-handedly operated by an attacker to perform a DDoS attack on targeted servers.

Types of DDoS Attacks

There are some common types of DDoS attacks:

1. Application Layer Attacks 

2. Protocol Layer Attacks 

3. Volumetric Layer Attacks