What is DDoS Attack?

May 7, 2021

The Belgian Government sites were recently knocked offline due to DDoS attack. Several government sites and Internet Service Providers of the public sector of the country were hit hard by DDoS.

What is DDoS?

DDoS is Distributed Denial of Service. It is a cyber threat that seeks to disrupt the normal traffic of a targeted server. This is done by controlling a network of malware infected devices.

This is like an unexpected traffic jam arriving at a destination.

What happened in Belgium?

Malware was sent into the Belnet Network. This network hosts the government websites, police services and government universities and research institutes. After the network was infected with the Malware virus, the entire network was remotely controlled.

Working of DDoS

The attack is carried out with a network of Internet connected devices. Malware is first sent to infect a network of computers and other devices. These infected devices and computers are called bots. A group of such bots in the DDoS are called Botnet.

First a Botnet is established in DDoS attack. Now the attacker is able to send direct instructions to each bot in the Botnet. The Bots will then send requests to the targeted IP address. The server eventually becomes overwhelmed and results in denial of service to the normal traffic.