What is the term for an attack that uses multiple compromised machines to overwhelm a victim?

• A. DoS attack
• B. DDoS attack
• C. ICMP
• D. None of the above

Answer: (B)

An attack that uses many compromised machines to overwhelm a victim is a distributed denial-of-service, or DDoS, attack. The defining factor is distribution: the attacker mobilizes a botnet of compromised devices to flood the target with traffic or requests. Because the sources are scattered across many hosts, it’s much harder to block or filter, and the target’s bandwidth and resources get saturated. This contrasts with a traditional denial-of-service that comes from a single machine, which is easier to counter by blocking that one source. ICMP is simply a protocol that can be used in floods, not the term for the multi-source attack. So DDoS best fits the description.