Network Security Instructional Terminology Practice Test

A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack uses many compromised machines to flood a target. The attacker controls a botnet—thousands of infected computers, routers, or devices—that all send traffic to the victim simultaneously. This huge, multi-source flood overwhelms the target’s bandwidth or processing capacity, making services unavailable to legitimate users. The distributed aspect is what makes DDoS especially hard to defend against, since filtering traffic from a single source isn’t effective when the load comes from many different origins. This is in contrast to a single-source DoS, which comes from one machine and is generally easier to block. The other options describe unrelated concepts.