Eduardo Vasconcellos May 05, 2021 DDoS cyberattacks can happen anytime and devastate any business, but by understanding how they occur and how to prevent them, you can continue to surf the web safely. A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack is a type of cyberattack that hackers often use to breach a network and overload it with unwanted traffic to disrupt services. Once the system is strained to its limit, it no longer accepts legitimate traffic, and services start to fail. Think of a DDoS attack as a crowd blocking the way into your favorite coffee shop: It's tough for you to get in, and it makes it difficult for that business to distinguish a real customer from the rest of the crowd. Because of that confusion, it's tough for businesses that are targeted by a DDoS attack to serve their customers and distinguish who's real and who's not.