Security News > 2021 > January > Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks: A cheat sheet
Independent of who uses them, denial of service attacks can be particularly disruptive and damaging for organizations targeted by cybercriminals.
TechRepublic's cheat sheet on denial of service attacks is a comprehensive guide to this topic.
It is also available as a download, Cheat sheet: Distributed denial of service attacks.
A denial of service attack is an attack strategy in which a malicious actor attempts to prevent others from accessing a web server, web application, or cloud service by flooding it with service requests.
While a DoS attack is essentially single origin, a distributed denial of service attack uses a large number of machines on different networks to disrupt a particular service provider; this is more challenging to mitigate, as the attack is being waged from multiple sources.
Principally, denial of service attacks affect the internet-connected host targeted by the attacker.