In 2016, hackers using a network of compromised internet-connected devices — vulnerable security cameras and routers — knocked some of the then biggest websites on the internet offline for several hours. Twitter, Reddit, GitHub and Spotify all went down intermittently that day, victims of what was at the time one of the largest distributed denial-of-service attacks in history.
DDoS is a form of cyberattack where bad actors flood websites with malicious traffic with the goal of taking them offline. DDoS attacks had existed for years before 2016, but the fact that this one incident took down so many major services drew the attention of people who didn’t know much about cybersecurity.
Since then, no DDoS attack has ever been so newsworthy, but the problem hasn’t gotten away. On December 15, 2022, right before Christmas — historically a popular time to launch DDoS attacks — the FBI announced that it had taken down dozens o …
