A denial-of-service (DoS) attack is a malicious attempt to overwhelm a web property with traffic in order to disrupt its normal operations. A type of cyber attack in which a malicious actor aims to render a computer or other device unavailable to its intended users by interrupting the device’s normal functioning. DoS attacks typically function by overwhelming or flooding a targeted machine with requests until normal traffic is unable to be processed, resulting in denial-of-service to addition users. A DoS attack is characterized by using a single computer to launch the attack.
A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is a type of DoS attack that comes from many distributed sources, such as a botnet DDoS attack. Learn more in the Cloudflare Learning Center.
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