Cyber Security

A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack floods a server with so many requests that it cannot respond to legitimate users, making the service slow or completely unavailable.

The attack is distributed because the flood of requests comes from many computers at once, often a network of machines that have been infected with malware (a botnet) and are controlled remotely without their owners' knowledge. The server is overwhelmed by the sheer volume of traffic and either slows to a crawl or stops responding entirely. A DDoS attack does not usually steal data; its aim is to disrupt access to a service.