What is a DDoS Attack?

“DDoS” stands for “distributed denial of service.” A DDoS attack is a type of DoS attack. Where as a DoS attack originates from a single computer, a DDoS attack can come from thousands of unique IP addresses worldwide. They are both types of cyber attacks that intend to deny service to users and disrupt a business’s website by flooding a website’s servers with a massive amount of data. This will cause the servers to crash, which will make the website inaccessible. Hackers often use DDoS attacks to target banks, or else to make a political or social statement. It can also be an act of state-sponsored or government-sponsored cyber warfare.

Read More: The Facts: Which Countries are Hacking US Servers?

Hong Kong Attack

This attack was likely a state-sponsored attack on behalf of the Chinese government, but it is still unknown. The attack reached a remarkable total of 500 gigabits per second of data, and was carried out during Hong Kong’s Occupy Central political protests in 2014. The DDoS attacks occurred on independent, pro-democracy websites.

Spamhaus Attack

In 2013, Spamhaus, a company that identifies and blocks spam for email users, reported massive DDoS attacks over the course of a week. The attacks reached a total of about 300 gigabits per second, and are believed to have been carried out by Dutch web hosting company Cyberbunker. The reason for this, it is speculated, is because Spamhaus added Cyberbunker to its spam blacklist.

Cloudflare Attack

Cloudflare, which provides content delivery and security, reported in 2014 that one of their clients received a series of DDoS attacks that reached 400 gigabits per second. The client is still unknown, but the attack was aimed at European servers.

Dyn Attack

You may remember this attack more clearly, in that it just occurred in October of this year. Dyn, which provides a large chunk of the Internet’s domain name system, experienced a series of DDoS attacks against US and European sites. Some of these sites included Twitter, Netflix, CNN, Reddit, and the Guardian. The attacks were largely made up of smart devices, as opposed to computers, which were infected with malware and used to attack Dyn’s servers. Although the size of the attack is still unknown, it may have reached up to 1.2 terabits per second — more than twice the size of previous attacks.