What are Distributed Denial of Service Attacks?
A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack utilizes multiple PCs or servers to initiate a coordinated attack against a targeted system. To create a very large army of assets that can launch these DDoS attacks, botnets are used to rally and command unwitting victim machines into participating in the attacks. The criminals establish the botnet by using malicious software (malware) to infect victim machines (hosts). The infected hosts are rallied and then instructed to launch a coordinated DDoS attack against the victim of choice. In this manner, thousands or tens of thousands of unwitting hosts can simultaneously flood a list of targeted systems, rendering even the most robust websites or web applications unable to respond to legitimate customer requests. The risk to enterprise networks is that the enterprise is unwittingly participating in attacks on unknown victims, and that malware capable of a variety of criminal attacks has penetrated the enterprise. For ISPs and their customers,
