Introduction
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) is a type of cyber attack that aims to make a website, online service, or network unavailable to its intended users. It works by overwhelming the target with a massive amount of fake or malicious traffic, causing it to become slow, unresponsive, or completely inaccessible.
To understand DDoS, imagine a popular restaurant with limited seating capacity. Now, imagine a group of people coordinating to send a flood of customers to the restaurant all at once, far more than it can handle. As a result, the restaurant becomes overcrowded, and legitimate customers are unable to find seats or place orders. The same principle applies to DDoS attacks but in the digital world.
In a DDoS attack, the attackers use a network of compromised computers or devices, called a botnet, to send an overwhelming amount of traffic to the target. These compromised devices can be regular computers, servers, or even Internet of Things (IoT) devices like smart refrigerators or cameras. The attackers take control of these devices without the owners' knowledge and command them to send malicious traffic to the target.
The goal of a DDoS attack is to exhaust the target's resources, such as its internet bandwidth, server processing power, or memory so that it cannot handle legitimate user requests.