Distributed
Denial of Service (DDoS) is on the rise to becoming one of the most commonly
used cyber-crime committed in the digital world, and it is constantly evolving
very rapidly making it more difficult than ever as well as to prevent it,
especially where most of our personal and professional day-to-day activities
are handled over the cyberspace. It is a very devastating method that hackers utilize
to target organizations, services, or individuals that could potentially cost
businesses upon millions of dollars, or leave individual users with frustration,
desperately trying to access a website or service finding themselves unable to
connect or just render the users network unusable. This paper will discuss and explore
the brief history of DDoS and what a DDoS attack is, describe the process of an
attack, analyze different types of DDoS attacks, explore different strategies to
generally defend a system from an attack, and essentially how to take
precautionary measures to prevent the attack.

What is a DDoS? A DDoS is short for Distributed Denial of Service, according
to the article “25 years of Ddos” by Aftab Afzal that to this date, it has been
at least 29 years since the very first recorded DDoS attack. Since then, the
internet has seen multiple different ways the attack can be executed,
ultimately sharing the same results of shutting down the availability of the
victim and its services. According to the author of “Guide to DDoS Attacks” Lee
Myers describes it as “A standard DDoS attack occurs when attackers are able to
send a very large amount of malformed network traffic directly to a target
server or network. One of the ways an attacker can accomplish this is by using
a botnet to send the traffic. A botnet is a large number of victim computers,
or zombies, connected over the internet, that communicate with each other and
can be controlled from a single location. When an attacker uses a botnet to
perform the DDoS attack, they send instructions to some or all of the zombie
machines connected to that botnet, thereby magnifying the size of their attack,
making it originate from  multiple
networks and possibly from multiple countries.” As someone who spends a lot of
time over the internet, whether it is to play video games, shop online, watch
television shows, watch movies, chatting with friends and family on social
media or to just simply browse the world-wide web. I have personally encountered
a DDoS attack first hand while playing a video game called Counter Strike. It is a very competitive online first-person
shooter for the PC and currently one of the most played eSports (Electronic
Sports) game, a professional league that hosts tournaments worldwide with having
the grand prize of $1 million dollars. I had the pleasure of being in a match against
someone I would never have thought of being a hacker. It all happened when my
team were winning, and in the last ten rounds out of thirty rounds, one of our
opponents decided that it was the appropriate time to unleash a DDoS attack on
one of our teammates. Our teammate who was the one who contributed the most
kills in the match, he started to experience a sudden massive increase their
ping jumping from 60 to about 999+ ping, it increased to a point where he was
unable to reconnect for the remainder of the match. His whole network was shut
down and was unable to reconnect to anything, not hearing a single thing from
our teammate until long after losing the match we were winning just before the
attack happened.