What is a DDos Attack? - A Simple Explanation

Were you one of the millions of people frustrated by Google services like Classroom and Gmail being down earlier today? If so, and you turned to Twitter to see who else was talking about it, you may have noticed that #DDoS was a trending topic as people speculated that perhaps Google was the victim of a DDoS attack. (So far Google has not given an explanation of what caused the outage). 

I had one student in my classroom this morning and the rest were virtual. Since I couldn't reach my virtual students I scrapped this morning's lesson plan and talked with my one in-person student about network and data security. We ended up spending a good bit of time talking about DDoS as it was a trending and relevant topic for my class. Specifically, we did a lot of speculation on the various ways a DDoS attack might get started. 

If you're wondering what the heck a DDoS attack is and why it would be relevant to all users of cloud-based services, take a look at PowerCert's animated explanation of DDoS. It's one of the best "non-techy" explanations I've found.

Update: 10:45am ET Google released a short statement about the outage. It was not related to a DDoS attack.