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Security Operations · Foundational

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS)

A denial-of-service attack launched from many sources, often a botnet, to overwhelm a target.

Definition

DDoS attacks are categorized as volumetric (bandwidth), protocol (state exhaustion) and application-layer (layer 7). Distributed sources make simple IP blocking ineffective. Mitigation uses upstream scrubbing services, CDNs, anycast, rate limiting and web application firewalls.

Example

A botnet sending 2 Tbps of UDP reflection traffic at a gaming provider.

Exam tip

Cloud-based DDoS scrubbing/CDN is the best answer for large volumetric attacks.

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