An overview of DDoS attacks

© The Author(s) 2014. In this chapter, we firstly review the short history of denial of service (DoS) and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. We further explore the reasons why the current cyberspace is a heaven for cyber criminals, such as DDoS attackers. We present the challenges of the DDoS related research fields from various aspects, and discuss the possible research methods and strategies to serve the challenges.