Which term describes a large-scale denial-of-service attack conducted via many compromised hosts to overwhelm a target?

• A. DoS attack
• B. UDP flood
• C. DDoS attack
• D. Volumetric Attacks

Answer: (C)

A distributed denial-of-service attack uses many compromised hosts to overwhelm a target, causing service disruption. The key idea is that traffic originates from numerous machines, often controlled as a botnet, which makes it harder to stop by blocking a single source. This contrasts with a DoS attack, which comes from a single source. A UDP flood is a specific method of flooding the target with UDP packets and can be part of a DoS or DDoS, but it doesn’t by itself convey the distributed nature. Volumetric Attacks describe the goal of saturating bandwidth with high volumes of traffic, regardless of how many sources are involved. The scenario described—large-scale, multi-source damage—fits best with a distributed denial-of-service attack.