DoS is an acronym for denial of service. DDoS is distributed denial of service. Both DoS and DDoS are methods of hacking or cyber attacks. DoS is one of the most common cyber threats of the day. DDoS is not as common as DoS attacks but the probability of distributed denial of service attacks today is much higher.
Difference Between DoS and DDoS
Let us first understand the scope and impact of denial of service attacks. Not every cyber attack is aimed at stealing data or breaking down the security apparatus put in place, including the firewall. At times, cyber attacks are just rendering a website inaccessible or taking down a website. Denial of service attacks are essentially attempts to clog the servers, to incapacitate the servers hosting the website, to make applications and the overall website unavailable to users who are authorized to have access and such attacks may also have an impact on the security put in place by the company.
A denial of service attack will affect the business interests of a company, can lead to malfunctioning of the website for hours, days, weeks and even months, ordinary people or the customers would not be able to use the site and hence be denied of the services promised by the company.
A denial of service or DoS attack may be to just harm the interests of a company or individual. It may also be a smokescreen to conceal the real intent of the hackers. It is absolutely possible that the hackers are stealing information, planting malware or doing all kinds of nefarious acts while the denial of service attack has been executed and people are unable to access the site or the servers that they should get access to.
A distributed denial of service attack is essentially the same but the method is different. A denial of service attack may be initiated in many ways. The server can be hacked, there may be immense artificial traffic that would choke the bandwidth, there may be requests sent to the server that will overload it due to complexities of the applications and that may bring down the website and there are many other ingenious ways.
A distributed denial of service attack will use multiple devices, multiple users and a well connected network to launch the denial of service attack. Whatever is the modus operandi of initiating the hack, be it increased traffic or application requests, planning a malware or just invading the servers, it would be done through multiple devices and using multiple programs in a distributed denial of service or DDoS attack.
