You got a website that's running smoothly but all of a sudden you find that it is taking you more than 2 minutes to load up your site which previously was around 3 then you probably need to wrap up your sleeves because your website is under attack.
One of the most common attack that doesnt only affect the the famous sites like google, amazon, playstation etc but also very uncommon sites with user base of more than 100.
So does happened with me when the project i was working in a bangalore based startup was live and after 7 days at around 11pm i got a call that there are complaints that the site is taking more than 5 minutes to load or is not even loading. I knew that it was not a code problem but something to do with the server. I immediately navigated to the azure app service and found the traffic graph spiking.
source
Thats unusual cause how can a website with advertisement only in the circle could gain a traffic of 30 thousands from mere 300 in just 1 minute. This was a DDOS attack.
What is a DDOS attack?
Distributed denial of service or DDOS is When a person with aim to gain control over your network just over flows your application with a lot of traffic. This overloading of traffics of your server can cause your server to hang and the genuine users will find that the website is taking too long to load or is not even opening up due to server timeout.
It happens because at first the server was only able to handle considering x no of traffic/users. But doe to DDOS attack the traffic on the server becomes 1000*x (considering). Now since your server will only be able to handle the x users so the rest of the users i.e, (1000*x) - x will have to wait till those x are served. Thus your application will hang up.
The user with malicious intent is able to generate so much traffic with the help of botnet. A group of multiple compromised computer systems called as bots which are infected with malicious malware.
