What is a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Attack?

DDoS is an attack that attempts to disrupt the normal traffic of a server, service or network by flooding it with increased traffic from multiple sources to ultimately crash or stall it. Often, this is carried out through control of malware infected devices around the Internet and controlled by a group who rents out this “bot herd” to people who wish to use it to perform this kind of attack.