Definitions for "Distributed Denial of Service attack"
Keywords:  denial, launch, attack, trin, botnet
A malicious kind of attack that floods the intended destination IP address with requests. Example: by pinging 400 to 500 times per second.
An automated denial of service attack that runs simultaneously from multiple computers.
A hacker does not usually directly attack a network. They would probably not have the computing power required and they could be caught quite easily. A hacker will try and take control of a number of computers usually involving locating and compromising unprotected computers (usually by means of a trojan) and launch an attack from these to obfuscate where the attack is really coming from. Once these “bots” (they are basically remote controlled) have been taken over they will use them to attempt exploitation of the target system i.e. major e-commerce sites - and sometimes against government and other official sites. Many machines attempting to access a service at the same time could thus deny access to the service to others. The fact the attack is distributed gives us the name.
programs sneaked onto other systems (often by viruses) are activated to bombard websites in order to bring them down.