Everything Your Business Needs to Know About DDoS Attacks

“OK. So… exactly what is a DDoS attack?” Unfortunately, it’s a question being asked with increasing regularity by owners and CEOs confronted with the news that their systems have suffered an attack.

DDoS (Distributed Denial-of-Service) attacks pose a constant and escalating threat to all businesses. According to cyber security training platform StationX, between 2020 and 2022 cyber attacks against SMBs surged by 150%, reaching 31,000 attacks per day globally. A 2025 roundup of cyber crime statistics from one of the UK’s leading managed services firms, meanwhile, revealed that enterprise organisations undergo an eyewatering 1700 attacks each day.

Regardless of size, it’s important for all businesses to understand how DDoS attacks work, what their impact might be and, most importantly, how to prevent DDoS attacks.

We’ve put together this guide to help you understand the fundamentals of DDoS attacks, the types businesses face, why they are targeted, and the best strategies for prevention and mitigation. And we’ll also look at how Vorboss can help you safeguard your operations and prevent DDos attacks from succeeding.

What is a DDoS Attack?

A DDoS attack aims to overwhelm a system, service, or network with excessive internet traffic, leaving it inaccessible to legitimate users. In business terms, the consequences can be extremely serious, leading to financial loss, reputational damage and substantial disruption to operations.

So what’s the difference between a DoS and DDoS attack, as both terms are often mentioned when a business  has been affected? In a traditional DoS (Denial-of-Service) attack, a single system is usually involved in launching the attack. A DDoS attack, in contrast, leverages multiple compromised computers, often distributed globally, to create a coordinated assault. These devices form what is known as a botnet – an army of infected machines controlled by a malicious actor whose agenda which may range from the criminal to the pointlessly disruptive.

Now let’s try to answer the question, “What are DDoS attacks?” at a technical level. Typically, DDoS attacks work by exploiting weaknesses in internet-connected systems, using a range of techniques to flood the target with requests. Attackers may direct massive amounts of data at a server to exhaust its bandwidth, send malformed network packets to confuse and crash the system, or target vulnerabilities in applications to bring them down. Because the traffic appears to come from many different sources, blocking the attack is much more complex than dealing with a single-source DoS attack.

There are also some common misconceptions about what DDoS attacks are. One of these is that only large companies are really at risk. In reality, however, businesses of all sizes are targeted all the time, including small and medium enterprises. Another misconception is that firewalls alone provide adequate protection. While firewalls play an important role in network security, they are not designed to handle the sheer scale of a DDoS attack. People also often assume that a DDoS attack would be immediately noticeable. Many attacks begin subtly, however, gradually increasing in intensity over time. This makes early detection and mitigation a critical part of how to prevent DDoS attacks.

Types of DDoS Attacks:

DDoS attacks come in several forms, each with its own approach to overwhelming a system. With IBM’s 2024 Cost of a Data Breach Report revealing that the global average cost of a data breach (across both enterprise and SMB targets) had reached $4.88 million, it’s worth being aware of the different attack types, so you can take targeted action to defend against them.

• Volumetric Attacks

Volumetric attacks are among the most common and straightforward forms of DDoS attacks. They work by consuming all the available bandwidth between the target system and the rest of the internet, so that the system has no capacity to handle legitimate users or customers. Because of their scale, these attacks can be devastating, with the total amount of data being directed at the target system sometimes reaching trillions of bits per second in intensity – far beyond what most networks are designed to handle. The way that attackers achieve this is by generating a massive flood of data requests, often using the botnets described earlier to amplify their impact. Examples of volumetric type attacks include UDP floods, ICMP floods, and DNS amplification attacks.

To combat volumetric attacks, businesses need robust traffic filtering solutions, content delivery networks (CDNs), and scalable network infrastructure that’s capable of absorbing these kinds of sudden surge in demand.

• Protocol Attacks

Protocol attacks, which are also known as state-exhaustion attacks, exploit vulnerabilities in network protocols to use up server resources. Unlike volumetric attacks that overwhelm bandwidth, protocol attacks specifically target weaknesses in the way devices and applications handle network connections. SYN floods, Ping of Death and Smurf attacks are all examples of this type of attack.

Protocol attacks can be difficult to detect because they don’t rely on massive traffic spikes. Instead, they stealthily take advantage of standard networking functions, causing a system to become sluggish or unresponsive. A business can mitigate these attacks using firewall rules, rate-limiting strategies and dedicated intrusion detection systems that monitor network activity for unusual patterns.

• Application Layer Attacks

Application layer attacks, which are also known as Layer 7 attacks, are the most sophisticated and difficult kind of DDoS to detect. These attacks target the application or service layer of a system, mimicking legitimate requests but at a scale designed to overwhelm backend processes. Because they don’t generate massive volumes of traffic like volumetric attacks, they often outwit traditional detection methods.

One well-known example is the HTTP flood, where attackers send an overwhelming number of HTTP requests to a website, forcing the server to process each request until it becomes overloaded. Another Application Layer DDoS attack example is the Slowloris attack, where an attacker opens multiple connections to a target server and sends partial HTTP requests, keeping them open for as long as possible to consume server resources.

Application layer attacks are particularly dangerous because they target specific functions of a business’s digital services. A well-crafted attack can take down your login pages, API endpoints, or online transaction systems, disrupting essential operations in your business.

“How do I stop DDoS attacks of this kind?” Good question. Mitigation strategies include using web application firewalls (WAFs), traffic analysis tools and bot mitigation services to distinguish between human users and automated threats.

To develop an effective defence strategy, as at Vorboss we routinely do for business customers, a business and its security partner need to understand the different types of DDoS attacks. By combining multiple layers of security – such as firewalls, traffic monitoring, and scalable infrastructure – you can significantly reduce your risk of falling victim to these disruptive cyber threats.

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