What is DDoS Protection?
DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) protection is a set of tools and techniques used to defend a website or server against DDoS attacks, where malicious actors overwhelm a target with a massive volume of traffic from multiple sources to make it unavailable to legitimate users.
How Does DDoS Protection Work?
DDoS attacks work by flooding a server, network, or application with more traffic than it can handle. Attackers typically use botnets, which are networks of thousands or millions of compromised devices, to generate this traffic. Attacks can target different layers of the network stack, from volumetric attacks that saturate bandwidth to application-layer attacks that exhaust server resources.
DDoS protection systems use various techniques to mitigate attacks including traffic analysis and filtering, rate limiting, IP reputation scoring, behavioral analysis, and geographic filtering. Many CDN providers like Cloudflare offer built-in DDoS protection by absorbing attack traffic across their global network. Effective DDoS protection is essential for any website that needs to maintain availability, as attacks can take down even well-provisioned servers.