Distributed denial of service is a type of cyberattack that is aimed at disrupting online resources and services by overwhelming them with traffic. When the resources are unavailable the online service will be rendered unusable during the duration of the attack. The distributed nature of the traffic will be the hallmark of this type of attack. The malicious traffic usually originates from a botnet that is spread across the world.
Cybercriminals have developed many technical ways to take out online targets via DDoS attacks and these techniques fall into three major types.
Protocol Attacks
These types of DDoS attacks are designed in a way to eat up into the processing capabilities of VPS servers, load balancers, and firewalls. This is normally achieved by overburdening Layer’s 3 and 4 of the protocol communications with malignant connection requests.
Application Attacks
These are an even more sophisticated variant of DDoS attacks. They leverage the fragility in the application layer or layer 7. This is achieved by opening connections and initiating transaction requests and processes that make use of resources like memory and hosting SSD space.
Volumetric Attacks
These are the classic type of DDoS attacks and make use of such methods to generate great volumes of traffic that can saturate bandwidth, which creates a traffic jam, making it impossible for the legitimate traffic to move in or out of the targeted site.
These are the different types of DDoS attacks and in reality, cybercriminals mix and match these attacks to improve the efficiency of the attack and to increase the pain. Together with volumetric attacks, a single DDoS campaign can make use of other application and protocol attacks as well.