Security also: Distributed Denial of Service

DDoS

Coordinated traffic flood from many sources.


In plain terms

L3/L4 (volumetric, SYN floods) vs L7 (HTTP slow-loris, regex). Anycast + scrubbing centers (Cloudflare, AWS Shield) absorb the volumetric kind.

Origin

Trin00 (1999) was the first widely-distributed DDoS toolkit. The 2016 Mirai botnet — IoT cameras attacking Dyn DNS — knocked Twitter, GitHub, and Reddit offline for hours and made volumetric DDoS a board-level topic.

Where it shows up in production
  • Cloudflare DDoS Anycast network absorbs L3/L4 floods at edge; published a 71M rps record in February 2023.
  • AWS Shield Two tiers — Standard is free on all AWS-fronted traffic; Advanced adds dedicated response.
  • Mirai botnet (2016) IoT-driven 1.2 Tbps flood against Dyn DNS. Triggered the modern era of always-on DDoS mitigation.
Sources & further reading
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