Distributed denial-of-service attack

A distributed denial-of-service attack overwhelms a target’s network, service, or application with traffic generated by many devices or sources, disrupting access for legitimate users.

Botnet: A network of internet-connected devices controlled remotely, often without their owners’ knowledge. Compromised devices can generate the distributed traffic that overwhelms a target.
Internet Protocol: The network-layer protocol that carries datagrams between hosts across interconnected networks. Attack traffic travels through IP networks toward the target.
Web application firewall: A security filter that monitors and controls HTTP traffic to and from a web application. It can block abusive application-layer requests while allowing ordinary web traffic.
Denial-of-service attack: An attack that makes a computer system or service unavailable to its intended users. Unlike a distributed attack, it may originate from a single source.
Service-level agreement: A contract specifying measurable service expectations, such as availability and response time. An outage can breach promised availability and trigger contractual remedies.
Reflection attack: An attack that sends requests with a forged source address so third-party servers direct replies to the victim. It amplifies traffic by making intermediaries send replies to the target.
Transmission Control Protocol: A transport protocol that provides reliable, ordered byte streams between applications. TCP connection state can become a resource targeted by flooding attacks.
Content delivery network: A geographically distributed network that serves content close to users and absorbs or routes traffic. Its distributed capacity can absorb floods and reduce load on an origin server.
Distributed reflection denial-of-service attack: A distributed denial-of-service attack that uses third-party services to reflect and often amplify traffic toward a victim. Reflection is a specific traffic-generation technique within the broader attack class.
Business continuity: An organization’s ability to maintain or restore essential operations during disruption. Continuity plans determine how critical services function during an attack.

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