DDoS Attack

A Distributed Denial of Service attack coordinates traffic from many compromised hosts—a botnet—to exhaust a target’s bandwidth, connection table, or application resources until legitimate users cannot reach it. Unlike a simple DoS attack from one source, the distributed origin makes source-based blocking ineffective because thousands of IP addresses hit at once. For N10-009, know the three flood categories: volumetric (UDP/ICMP floods that saturate bandwidth), protocol (SYN floods that exhaust connection-state tables), and application-layer (HTTP GET floods targeting web servers). Mitigation relies on upstream scrubbing centers, rate limiting, and anycast diffusion—not merely adding firewall rules.