You’ve probably heard the term DDoS in the news recently when it comes to cyber security.  So, what is a DDoS?

DDoS, or “Distributed Denial of Service” is a type of cyber-attack that is meant to be very disruptive.

DoS stands for “denial of service” and refers to an attack that overwhelms a system with data—most commonly a flood of synchronized requests sent to a website to view its pages, causing the web server to crash or simply become inoperable as it struggles to respond to more requests than it can handle. As a result, legitimate users who try to access the web site controlled by the server are unable to do so.

DDoS attacks attempt to consume the bandwidth either within the target network/service, or between the target network/service and the rest of the Internet. These attacks are simply about causing congestion – creating a major headache for users.

These attacks can run from just a few minutes to a few weeks depending on the severity.