Referred to as DoS, denial of service is a singular attack on a security system from one source. If the attack is coming from multiple points, that’s referred to as a distributed denial of service or DDoS. Regardless, the result is the same.

A good analogy for this attack is similar to a group of people blocking an entry way to a store. These individuals are merely clogging up the store and preventing people from entering. As such, this kind of attack is typically targeting large and high profile companies like banks or multi-million dollar companies.

In fact, one notable attack of this nature came in 2000 where a 15-year old boy launched the first recorded DDoS attack. The boy was Michael Calce, known as “Mafiaboy” on an online chat server, hacked into computers from a variety of universities. He then used the servers to crash sites like CNN, eBay, Amazon, and Yahoo.

As for the specific techniques of these attacks there are a wide variety of ways. But most importantly, the idea is to clog and disrupt processes and systems. As such, most attacks will have those sorts of behaviours where an individual or multiple people will hack a system and flood it with useless requests to the point the system will be unable to help those who are actually using the system.

To the average user, there is no chance that you’d be targeted. Instead you may be affected by those attacks as DDoS attacks can and will target banks, credit providers, or places where you frequently buy products. The only real preventative measures you can take is to record or memorize your info and keep it on your person and to never save passwords elsewhere.