Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS)
A cyberattack that floods a target with traffic from many compromised devices at once to knock it offline.
A Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack overwhelms a website, server, or network with a massive flood of traffic from many different sources at once, typically a botnet↗ of hijacked devices, so that legitimate users can't get through. Unlike a single-source denial-of-service attack, the distributed nature makes DDoS traffic much harder to filter out or block.
DDoS attacks are often used for extortion, to disrupt a competitor, or as a smokescreen to distract security teams while a separate intrusion happens elsewhere. Mitigating them typically requires specialized traffic-scrubbing services or content delivery networks capable of absorbing and filtering enormous volumes of malicious traffic.