What is a Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack?
This is not a trivial attack by some script kiddie. DDOS is a serious and well-planned attack, usually with the purpose extorting ransom. The idea behind it is to exhaust the target server or network’s limited resources. Small attacks try to exhaust the server’s CPU or memory by sending a lot of fake requests. The main challenge blocking the attacks is being able to detect legitimate traffic from harmful traffic. When it is a single script kiddie running a script to send overwhelming requests to your server, it’s enough to block his or her IP. A distributed attack is a whole different ballgame. Distributed attacks scale to a proportion that, no matter what you do, once your bandwidth is exhausted and your system is unable to sustain the number of invalid packets, your network will crumble. SCO was a very notorious case of just this type of massive attack. DDOS attackers start by spreading viruses or hacking many vulnerable systems, usually at universities where there are high bandwidth
