Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS)
Written by Max Hinchman
Introduction
Distributed denial of service or DDoS attack is the most common type of DoS (Denial of Service) attack. DDoS attacks work by overloading the targeted source with requests from multiple different computers. The sheer number of requests makes it difficult because the victims can not quickly figure out the source of the attacks nor can they distinguish between malicious or harmless traffic.
DDoS attacks can be broken down by three types: volume-based attacks, protocol attacks, and application layer attacks. A volume-based attack sends an extremely high number of requests to the target in order to overload the bandwidth. Protocol attacks exploit problematic areas in layer 3 or 4 of the protocol stack that cause the target to consume all of its processing capacity. Application attacks target the layer 7 in the protocol stack in order to cause the target to also
consume all of its processing capacity.
The reason for carrying DDoS attacks can vary from extortion, activism, boredom, or revenge. Sometimes, websites inadvertently become victims when a website simply generates more traffic than it can handle. This is commonly referred to as a website “crashing”. A famous malicious example of an DDoS attack is the GitHub attack on February 28, 2018. The 1.35 terabits traffic that hit GitHub is still to this day the most massive DDoS attack ever recorded. Unfortunately, DDoS attacks are on the rise so it is now as important as ever to take proper security measures.
Suggested Reading
What is a DDos Attack? by Cloudflare
DDoS Attacks: A Quick Guide by Security Response