Denial of service (DoS) attacks are the cyberweapon of choice for state-sponsored threat actors and freewheeling script kiddies alike. Independent of who uses them, denial of service attacks can be particularly disruptive and damaging for organizations targeted by cybercriminals. Since 2018, the frequency and power of DDoS attacks have been increasing, making them a more potent risk for organizations.

TechRepublic’s cheat sheet on denial of service attacks is a comprehensive guide to this topic. This article will be updated periodically as attack and mitigation strategies evolve.

From the cheat sheet:

WHAT IS A DENIAL OF SERVICE ATTACK?

A denial of service (DoS) attack is an attack strategy in which a malicious actor attempts to prevent others from accessing a web server, web application, or cloud service by flooding it with service requests. While a DoS attack is essentially single origin, a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack uses a large number of machines on different networks to disrupt a particular service provider; this is more challenging to mitigate, as the attack is being waged from multiple sources.