A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is a type of cybercrime in which the attacker floods a server with internet traffic to prevent users from accessing connected online services and sites. The goal of a DDoS attack is to overwhelm the devices, services, and network of its intended target with fake internet traffic, rendering them inaccessible to or useless for legitimate users. Here are some key points to understand about DDoS attacks:

• A DDoS attack is a subcategory of the more general denial-of-service (DoS) attack.
• In a DDoS attack, the incoming traffic flooding the victim originates from many different sources, making it harder to defend against than a DoS attack.
• Botnets are the primary way DDoS attacks are carried out. The attacker will hack into computers or other devices and install a malicious piece of code, or malware, called a bot. Together, the infected computers form a network called a botnet. The attacker then instructs the botnet to overwhelm the victims servers and devices with more connection requests than they can handle.
• DDoS mitigation is quite different than mitigating other cyberattacks, such as those originating from ransomware. DDoS attacks are generally mitigated by devices and services that have been enabled to handle these types of attacks.

DDoS attacks have become more common in recent years due to the greater availability of DDoS attack tools and the growing popularity and power of botnets.