A Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack is best described as which of the following?

• A. A denial-of-service attack that enlists the help of many bot-controlled devices.
• B. A DoS from a single computer.
• C. A hardware fault in routers.
• D. An insider data breach.

Answer: (A)

A distributed denial-of-service attack works by harnessing a large number of devices that have been compromised and are under the attacker’s control to flood the target with traffic. Because these devices are scattered and all push requests at once, the target’s resources get overwhelmed much more easily than from a single machine, making mitigation harder. This is why the description that mentions enlisting the help of many bot-controlled devices best captures what a DDoS does.

In contrast, a denial-of-service from one computer lacks the scale of disruption, a hardware fault in routers is a failure rather than an attack using compromised devices, and an insider data breach involves unauthorized access or exfiltration of data, not a flood of traffic aimed at taking a service offline.