What is a DDoS attack?

A DDoS attack, or Distributed Denial of Service attack, is characterized by its intent to overwhelm a system's resources, rendering it unavailable to legitimate users. This is achieved by flooding the target system with a massive volume of traffic, often sourced from multiple compromised devices, which creates a bottleneck or exhausts the resources necessary for normal operations. This can significantly disrupt services, leading to downtime for websites, applications, or entire systems.

In the context of cybersecurity, understanding DDoS attacks is crucial, as they can severely impact business operations and customer access. The other choices describe different concepts unrelated to DDoS attacks; encryption techniques are methods for securing data, malware refers to malicious software that compromises systems, and data analysis strategies pertain to examining data to identify patterns, which does not involve service disruption.