Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks have become a tool of choice for malicious organizations worldwide. Distributed Denial of Service attacks are different from Denial of Service attacks.
A Denial of Service (DoS) attack is a cyberattack in which an attacker makes a web application unavailable to its intended users – effectively denying service to them. Denial of Service attacks are typically accomplished by flooding the target application with fake traffic or requests, in an attempt to overload systems and prevent legitimate traffic from reaching the application server.
In a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, the attacker uses many different sources for the fake traffic – typically tens or hundreds of thousands. This makes it difficult to stop the attack by identifying and blocking a list of sources. A DDoS attack can be likened to sending a crowd of people to a retail store, who stand and block the entryway, preventing legitimate customers from entering.
The DDoS component includes the following sections: