Disclaimer: This article is intended for educational purposes related to cybersecurity, defensive security, and authorized security testing only. DoS/DDoS testing should only be conducted against systems, applications, networks, or lab environments where explicit authorization has been provided.
Introduction
Denial of Service (DoS) attacks target availability by exhausting a system or network resource, disrupting a service, or exploiting a weakness that causes a service to become unavailable.
A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack uses multiple distributed sources to achieve the same objective. The attack surface extends from network bandwidth and TCP state to HTTP services, APIs, databases, cloud resources, and vulnerable application components.
One can classify these attacks by the resource they target and the layer at which the disruption occurs. This makes their mitigation easier to understand and apply.
