Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Attack

A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is a malicious network offensive carried out by a group of systems against a single target. In a DDoS attack, perpetrators use traffic from multiple sources to flood a connected machine or service with requests, attempting to overwhelm its network and render it inoperable. DDoS attacks are significantly more difficult to combat than DoS attacks because multiple traffic sources are more difficult to identify.