DDoS
Distributed denial of service: flooding a target with traffic from many sources at once so that legitimate users cannot reach it.
A DDoS attack does not break into anything; it overwhelms. Thousands of compromised machines send requests or raw packets at a server or network link until it saturates. Because the sources are distributed, filtering by address is ineffective, and because many of the sources are IoT devices in homes, the traffic comes from ordinary residential networks.
IoT appears on both sides. Insecure devices are recruited into botnets that carry out attacks, as Mirai showed. And IoT backends are targets: a flood against an MQTT broker or an API endpoint can take an entire fleet’s connectivity down, which is why platforms sit behind scrubbing services and why devices need sensible reconnection backoff so they do not amplify the outage when service returns.
Part of the IoT Glossary. Spotted an error or a missing term? Tell us.