What is a DDoS attack and how can a blue team mitigate it at a high level

• A. A Phishing Campaign; Mitigate With User Training
• B. A Malware That Steals Credentials; Mitigate With Antivirus
• C. An Attack On Storage Capacity; Mitigate With More Disks
• D. An Attack That Overwhelms A Target With Traffic From Many Sources; Mitigate With Rate Limiting, Filtering, CDNs, Load Balancing, And Failover

Answer: (D)

A DDoS attack is when a target is overwhelmed with traffic from many different sources, exhausting bandwidth, processing power, or other resources so legitimate users can’t access the service. At a high level, a blue team mitigates this by reducing the load reaching the origin and keeping the service available through layered defenses. Rate limiting helps by capping how many requests a single source can make, which slows down the flood without collapsing the system. Filtering and firewall rules identify and drop suspicious traffic patterns or known malicious sources before they reach core infrastructure. A content delivery network places caching and edge capacity in front of the origin, absorbing a large portion of traffic and serving common content from edge nodes. Load balancing spreads traffic across multiple servers or data centers to prevent any one resource from becoming a bottleneck. Failover keeps services running by automatically switching to redundant systems or paths when the primary ones are overwhelmed. Together, these measures provide resilience against high-volume, multi-source traffic attacks.