How might one explain the meaning of “DDoS” to a less tech-savvy individual?
In: Technology
The internet consists of computers (servers) that receive requests for data from one or more other computers (clients). Computers are machines with finite resources – particularly regarding processing power, memory, and network bandwidth. There is always a limit to how many requests the server can process within a given time. When the limit is reached, it may cause delays processing requests, ignore further connections, drop existing connections, or cause the server to stop responding entirely.
A DoS (Denial of Service) attack is a deliberate, malicious attempt to reach this limit by sending many requests, or requests specially crafted to tie up resources, from a single machine.
A DDos (Distributed DoS) attack is the same thing, but using many machines to send the requests. Since the attack comes from many machines, it can be harder to stop attacks since it may be hard to tell which requests are legitimate or not. In fact you may not even necessarily know it’s an attack, it could just be a lot of legitimate users.
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