Which attack method shuts down a website by flooding it with traffic from multiple sources?

Which attack method shuts down a website by flooding it with traffic from multiple sources?

• A. DDoS
• B. APT
• C. Blacklisting
• D. Whitelisting

Answer: (A)

A distributed denial-of-service attack overwhelms a website by flooding its network with traffic from many different sources. By using a large set of compromised devices (a botnet), the attacker can generate a flood of requests or data that exhausts bandwidth, CPU, or memory. Because the traffic comes from numerous locations, it’s difficult to block with simple filtering, making the site unreachable for legitimate users. This differs from other concepts: an Advanced Persistent Threat is about covert, long-term access to steal or exfiltrate data; blacklisting blocks known bad sources, which doesn’t address the scale or distributed nature of a flood; and whitelisting only allows approved sources, which isn’t practical for public websites and also doesn’t describe a flooding mechanism.

A distributed denial-of-service attack overwhelms a website by flooding its network with traffic from many different sources. By using a large set of compromised devices (a botnet), the attacker can generate a flood of requests or data that exhausts bandwidth, CPU, or memory. Because the traffic comes from numerous locations, it’s difficult to block with simple filtering, making the site unreachable for legitimate users.

This differs from other concepts: an Advanced Persistent Threat is about covert, long-term access to steal or exfiltrate data; blacklisting blocks known bad sources, which doesn’t address the scale or distributed nature of a flood; and whitelisting only allows approved sources, which isn’t practical for public websites and also doesn’t describe a flooding mechanism.