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A Botnet is a network of so-called 'bots'. These are systems that cybercriminals have infected with malware. Among other things, they use bots to carry out DDoS attacks, and usually the original owner of the system is not aware of this. Bot networks can be of various sizes, up to several hundred thousand machines.

Our society is rapidly digitalizing. Financial institutions such as governments and banks offer their services online. In addition, a significant part of economic traffic also takes place in the digital sphere. DDoS attacks pose a serious threat to the digital society. Cybercriminals cause great economic and social damage by shutting down servers. Customers can no longer access an internet store, citizens can no longer use a digital government service, and savers can no longer access their accounts. This will cause a huge disruption. What makes DDOS especially dangerous is the relative ease with which malicious parties can carry out attacks. Malicious parties carry out DDoS attacks on demand.

The motivation behind a DDoS attack depends largely on the attacker. In general, however, a number of main motives can be distinguished. Motivation can be personal in nature. Think of teenagers attacking a popular website because they're bored, or an ex-employee going after a former employer out of spite. In such cases, it is usually not related to hardened criminals. This is different from a DDoS attack with a financial motive. Cyber criminals can blackmail companies by threatening a DDoS attack. Or they can be hired to attack an opponent. DDoS attacks also occur for political or ideological reasons. The websites of political opponents, critical media, or activist groups may be targets for malicious parties.

A DDoS attack cannot be prevented, but it can be repelled. There are several options to prevent a DDoS attack. It is possible to block web traffic from a specific geographical area. In fact, all web traffic is routed to a server. However, many organizations prefer to use a cleaning center. Data traffic is routed and 'cleaned' through specialist equipment. Only legitimate data traffic goes from the cleaning center to the destination.

DDoS stands for Distributed Denial of Service. In a DDoS attack, a large number of computers, usually scattered in many parts of the world, try to establish a connection with a server. "In this way, the attackers are trying to overload the server with traffic so that it can no longer provide a response: a denial of service. The capacity of the servers and the channels connecting the servers to the Internet is limited. Cybercriminals allow themselves to be "stuffed", for example, using "bot networks". Bot networks are networks of infected computers controlled by a cybercriminal. Infecting a computer with malware turns it into a 'bot'. The bots then infect other computers and the criminal proceeds to expand his network towards a bot network (botnet). In a DDoS attack, a cybercriminal causes the bots on his botnet to send internet traffic to a server at the same time, so that it is overwhelmed with access requests. The server will have insufficient capacity to process the traffic and will no longer be able to function properly or will crash completely. For example, visitors will no longer be able to access a website, or an online service will be severely delayed. The cybercriminal has thus achieved his goal.