SECAI Core · phase 11 of 15
Distributed denial of service attack
An attack that uses multiple compromised hosts (a botnet) to overwhelm a service with requests or response traffic.
The Explain card
- Plain English
- A DDoS attack uses many compromised machines, a botnet, to overwhelm a service with traffic all at once. Because the flood comes from everywhere, blocking a single source does nothing.
- Example
- Thousands of infected routers hammer a public model-hosting API with requests, exhausting connection limits and GPU capacity, while legitimate traffic queues behind the noise.
- Why it matters
- AI services with expensive inference are attractive DDoS targets. Defenders need upstream scrubbing, CDN fronting, and per-client quotas, because one origin cannot absorb the internet.
- Hook
- One voice is noise; a million voices is a wall.
Where it sits in the deck
Phase 11: Threat Landscape: Attack Vectors and Adversarial Techniques
With defences named, learn what they must defend against — the full catalogue of attack techniques targeting AI systems, their inputs, outputs, training pipelines, and supply chains.
