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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: November 21st, 2023

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  • DDOS is a symptom. A DDOS can cause different failure scenarios at different points.

    Maybe the attack is causing the service to access a backend database that isn’t equipped to handle the traffic. The web server queues requests but they can’t be handled in a timely manner.

    Maybe the attack causes a firewall to spend too much time inspecting the traffic by sending a malformed packet.

    Maybe the attack simply overwhelms the bandwidth of the firewall or router. The Reddit “hug of death” is a common example.

    In short, lots of things can lead to a service interruption. A DDOS is just a description of a way to cause that interruption by using distributed source hosts.