The aim of a denial of service attack (DDoS) is to disrupt or delay a service, system or network so that it is unresponsive and unavailable to end-users. This goal can be achieved by cyber attackers by exhausting the resources of the target, such as consuming its bandwidth, disk space or memory. A distributed denial-of-service attack is a specific type of DoS attack that targets multiple devices or an entire network and is sometimes achieved by using a botnet of unsecured internet-connected or Internet-of-things (IoT) devices such as smart meters or baby monitors.

The types of DDoS attacks are broad from HTTP floods that aim to overwhelm a target server with HTTP requests to deny actual users access, to a SYN flood attack which aims to consume all a server’s resources by repeatedly sending initial connection request (SYN) packets.  Our analytics platform and digital forensics solutions can help you to rapidly identify and prevent a DDoS attack, helping you to minimise the disruption to your organisation and the financial impact of a service DDoS attack. We often find that DDoS attacks are also used to obscure other types of attack. Our platform also helps our customers to look back and review an incident so that any remedial action or steps to prevent future cyber-attacks can be put in place.