Security Beginner

What is DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service)?

An attack that floods a target server or network with traffic from multiple sources to overwhelm it and deny service to legitimate users.

DDoS attacks use thousands of compromised devices (botnets) to generate massive traffic volumes. Types include volumetric attacks (flood bandwidth), protocol attacks (exploit protocol weaknesses), and application layer attacks (target specific services).

Mitigation includes CDN/DDoS protection services (Cloudflare, AWS Shield), rate limiting, geo-blocking, traffic analysis, and over-provisioning. DDoS attacks are common and can target any internet-facing service. Protection should be part of every production architecture.

Learn More About This Topic

SOC Analyst Fundamentals

Related reading

SOC Analyst Advanced: Incident Response & Forensics

Related reading

Ethical Hacking & Penetration Testing

Related reading

Related Terms

WAF (Web Application Firewall)

A security solution that filters and monitors HTTP traffic between a web application and the internet, blocking common attacks.

A technique that controls the number of requests a client can make to a server within a specified time period.

CSRF (Cross-Site Request Forgery)

An attack that tricks authenticated users into submitting unwanted requests to a web application they are logged into.

Secret Management

The practice of securely storing, accessing, and rotating sensitive credentials like API keys, passwords, and certificates.

A one-way function that converts input data into a fixed-size string of characters, used for data integrity and password storage.

Penetration Testing

An authorized simulated cyberattack on a system to evaluate its security defenses and identify vulnerabilities.

View All Security Terms →