What type of cyberattack overwhelms a service with traffic from many compromised devices?

A distributed denial-of-service attack overwhelms a service with traffic from many compromised devices.

In a DDoS attack, the attacker coordinates a botnet or other distributed group of systems to send requests, packets, or other traffic toward a target. The goal is to exhaust bandwidth, server resources, or application capacity so legitimate users cannot connect reliably.

A conventional denial-of-service attack may use one source, whereas the distributed form uses many sources. That distribution makes blocking the attack more difficult because the traffic can appear to come from numerous networks and countries.

DDoS attacks are different from data theft and from intrusion techniques such as SQL injection. Mitigation can include traffic filtering, rate limiting, content-delivery networks, and specialized scrubbing services.