Tutorial

What is a DDoS Attack?

Published on July 14, 2021
What is a DDoS Attack?

A Distributed Denial of Service (or DDoS) attack is a malicious attempt to deny legitimate traffic to a targeted server by flooding it with spurious requests. The attacker often accomplishes this by infecting a fleet of servers and internet-connected devices with malware in order to turn them into a botnet. This botnet is then instructed by the attacker to repeatedly send requests to the targeted server, overwhelming its available resources. This results in a denial of service to normal traffic.

For more information on DDoS attacks and how to mitigate and recover from them, please see the following documentation and tutorials:

Thanks for learning with the DigitalOcean Community. Check out our offerings for compute, storage, networking, and managed databases.

Learn more about us


About the authors

Still looking for an answer?

Ask a questionSearch for more help

Was this helpful?
 
Leave a comment


This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.

You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!

Try DigitalOcean for free

Click below to sign up and get $200 of credit to try our products over 60 days!

Sign up

Join the Tech Talk
Success! Thank you! Please check your email for further details.

Please complete your information!

Get our biweekly newsletter

Sign up for Infrastructure as a Newsletter.

Hollie's Hub for Good

Working on improving health and education, reducing inequality, and spurring economic growth? We'd like to help.

Become a contributor

Get paid to write technical tutorials and select a tech-focused charity to receive a matching donation.

Welcome to the developer cloud

DigitalOcean makes it simple to launch in the cloud and scale up as you grow — whether you're running one virtual machine or ten thousand.

Learn more
DigitalOcean Cloud Control Panel