Understanding DDoS and its attack patterns

As mentioned previously, DDoS attacks are extremely common worldwide. To begin, the initiator of a DDoS attack will focus on a specific target, being a single host, network, or service to compromise, and this target will likely be a key component of an organization's infrastructure. During the attack, an attempt will be made to severely disrupt the performance of the target using a massive amount of inbound requests from a number of different distributed sources within the same time period. 

This creates two problems, as follows:  

• The additional traffic load is designed to flood the target and prevent authentic and legitimate inbound requests from reaching that target and being processed as real requests.
• The performance of the target is hindered, affecting the usability of the infrastructure and its associated resources. For example, should a DDoS attack be made against a web server running a website, anyone using the site...