What are DDoS Attacks?

An attack that tries to knock a service offline by drowning it in fake traffic is called a Denial of Service (DoS) attack. When the flood comes from many machines at once, it is a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack: a malicious attempt to disrupt the normal traffic of a targeted server, service, or network by overwhelming the target, or the infrastructure around it, with a flood of internet traffic.

Picture a small shop. A DDoS attack is a crowd of hired troublemakers packing the doorway so tightly that real customers cannot get in. Nothing is stolen and nothing is broken