What is DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service)?
Crypto Glossary Definition
A common way to attack a network or website in order to render it unusable for a period of time. The attacker, often in control of a botnet, will overload the target by sending it more data than it can handle.
Why DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) Matters
A DDoS attack floods a target (an exchange's website, an API, a node) with overwhelming traffic to knock it offline — exchanges are a frequent target, and a DDoS hitting an exchange during high volatility can prevent users from trading at the worst possible moment.
DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) in Practice
An exchange's engineering team notices, in the middle of a sharp market-wide price drop, that their trading platform's API has suddenly become unresponsive, with incoming traffic spiking to many times its normal volume. Someone — possibly a competitor, possibly a bad actor hoping to profit from the chaos, possibly just an opportunistic attacker — has directed a botnet of compromised devices to flood the exchange's servers with junk requests, deliberately choosing this moment because it's when users most urgently need to access their accounts to react to the price move. Legitimate customers trying to sell or adjust positions find the site timing out or returning errors, unable to act while the market moves against them. The exchange's infrastructure team scrambles to filter malicious traffic and reroute legitimate requests through DDoS-mitigation services, but by the time service is restored, some traders have already been unable to execute trades they badly needed to make. This scenario illustrates why exchanges invest heavily in DDoS protection specifically around high-volatility periods, since an attack timed to coincide with a crash or rally can cause far more real financial damage to users than the same attack during a quiet market.
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