What Is a DDoS Attack and How It Works
Understand the major DDoS categories, attacker methods, and practical patterns defenders watch for.
DDoS categories
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attempts to overwhelm network, protocol, or application resources.
- Volumetric — floods like UDP/ICMP saturate bandwidth.
- Protocol — SYN floods, reflection/amplification abuse transport quirks.
- Application — HTTP request floods exhaust CPU, DB, or I/O.
Key metric: requests per second (RPS) and packets per second (PPS). Baseline before you mitigate.
Typical mitigations include anycast scrubbing, adaptive rate limits, TLS termination at edge, and caching.
Quick checklist
- Enable a WAF and bot mitigation
- Apply rate limiting and request throttling
- Put TLS everywhere and prefer HTTP/2 or HTTP/3
- Use anycast CDN/edge scrubbing where possible
- Monitor traffic baselines and alert on anomalies
FAQ
Is testing legal? Only against assets you own and with written authorization.
Does StressFW attack others? No. StressFW content focuses on defense education and authorized testing best practices.
DDoS Volumetric Application Mitigation