What is Distributed Denial of Service Attack:
There is only so much traffic a computer system can process before it starts to slow down and becomes overwhelmed. By gaining control over a large number of hijacked systems and devices (referred to as a botnet), attackers can direct massive amounts of connection requests or packets of random data at a single target all at once, to overload the system and take it offline.
What makes protection a challenge:
The larger the botnet, the more damage a DDoS attack can do. The best you can hope for when you’re attacked is that you’re subscribed to an anti-DDoS service, but even that doesn’t provide a guarantee you’ll stay up and running if you’re dealing with an attack with a high level of magnitude. To make matters worse, sometimes attackers will contact their targets ahead of time and threaten to knock them offline unless “protection money” is paid upfront. It can be challenging to discern whether such threats or only scams and — as is the case with ransomware — giving in to criminal extortion demands never comes with a guarantee.
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COMMON SECURITY THREATS SERIES:
Learn about other security threats you might be up against: