A DDoS attack, short for Distributed Denial-of-Service attack, is a type of cyberattack designed to overwhelm a server, website, or online service with massive amounts of traffic, causing it to slow down, crash, or become completely unavailable to legitimate users. Unlike a regular DoS attack that comes from a single device, a DDoS attack uses thousands or even millions of compromised devices connected through botnets to flood a target simultaneously. These attacks can disrupt businesses, gaming platforms, financial services, and critical infrastructure, often causing major financial losses and downtime. Cybercriminals launch DDoS attacks by exploiting networks of infected computers, servers, or IoT devices that have been secretly controlled through malware. Once activated, these devices send overwhelming requests or traffic to the target system, exhausting its bandwidth, processing power, or network resources. Different types of DDoS attacks exist, including volumetric attacks that flood bandwidth, protocol attacks targeting network infrastructure, and application-layer attacks aimed at overwhelming specific services like websites or APIs. In cybersecurity, defending against DDoS attacks requires strong network protection, traffic filtering, rate limiting, load balancing, and specialized DDoS mitigation services. Large organizations often use cloud-based protection systems capable of absorbing and filtering malicious traffic before it reaches their infrastructure. As internet dependency grows worldwide, DDoS attacks remain one of the most common and disruptive threats in modern cybersecurity, demonstrating how vulnerable online services can be without proper protection and monitoring. - @societysector