Distributed Denial of Service Attacks: A Threat or Challenge

In today’s cyber world, the Internet has become a vital resource for providing a plethora of services. Unavailability of these services due to any reason leads to huge financial implications or even consequences on society. Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks have emerged as one of the most serious threats to the Internet whose aim is to completely deny the availability of different Internet based services to legitimate users. The attackers compromise a large number of Internet enabled devices and gain malicious control over them by exploiting their vulnerabilities. Simplicity of launching, traffic variety, IP spoofing, high volume traffic, involvement of numerous agent machines, and weak spots in Internet topology are important characteristics of DDoS attacks and makes its defense very challenging. This article provides a survey with the enhanced taxonomies of DDoS attacks and defense mechanisms. Additionally, we describe the timeline of DDoS attacks to date and attempt to discuss its impact according to various motivations. We highlighted the general issues, challenges, and current trends of DDoS attack technology. The aim of the article is to provide complete knowledge of DDoS attacks and defense mechanisms to the research community. This will, in turn, help to develop a powerful, effective, and efficient defense mechanism by filling the various research gaps addressed in already proposed defense mechanisms.