Cybersecurity Glossary
Distributed Denial of Service
An attack that floods your website or network with traffic until legitimate visitors cannot get through.
What Distributed Denial of Service means
A denial of service attack overwhelms a target with requests. Distributed means the traffic comes from many machines at once, typically a botnet, which makes simple blocking ineffective. Attacks range from crude traffic floods to precise requests that exhaust a database.
Why Distributed Denial of Service matters for small businesses and nonprofits
For an organisation that takes bookings, donations or orders online, an outage during a campaign is direct lost revenue. Small sites are hit both as collateral damage and, occasionally, as extortion targets.
What to do about Distributed Denial of Service
- Put a content delivery and filtering layer such as Cloudflare in front of the site
- Know your hosting provider's escalation path before you need it
- Keep a static fallback page so visitors see something useful during an outage
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