The devastating impact of DDoS attacks on IT services

DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks are malicious attacks designed to overwhelm target computer systems by flooding their resources with artificially amplified traffic. The main aim of these attacks is to render services unavailable to legitimate users by exhausting the capacity of servers, networks or applications. DDoS attacks take advantage of a network of compromised machines, often called a botnet, to generate and send a massive stream of requests to the target. These machines are often malware-infected computers, remotely controlled by the attackers.

There are various forms of DDoS attack, each with its own specific characteristics. Bandwidth saturation attacks seek to clog communication channels, overwhelming infrastructures with excessive data throughput. Application Denial of Service (Layer 7) attacks specifically target applications and servers, exploiting vulnerabilities in communication protocols and overloading system resources. These attacks are often more complex to detect and counter, as they resemble legitimate traffic, making it difficult to distinguish between malicious and genuine requests.