DDoS attack

A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is a malicious attempt to disrupt normal traffic of a targeted server, service, or network by overwhelming the target or its surrounding infrastructure with a flood of Internet traffic.

A DDoS Attack happens when a Hacker has hijacked a number of computers (a.k.a. a “Botnet”) and uses them to send many requests a single end-point. The intent is to send so many requests to a platform that it cannot serve normal requests anymore, thus disabling the service that platform provides.

It is disproportionally hard to protect against this kind of attack. With a normal Denial of Service Attack one could block all requests from certain IP Addresses, but because with a DDoS Attack requests are coming from everywhere, this is not feasible.

Some CSPs have services that can be used to protect against a DDoS Attack. One example is AWS Shield.