It’s no surprise higher education institutions have become hotspots for cyber threats. With an ever-expanding digital footprint, universities and colleges face unique cybersecurity challenges, such as protecting student information and groundbreaking research.
In a DDoS attack, a website faces a surge in traffic beyond its capacity. Botnets, networks of infected devices controlled remotely by hackers, play a central role by simultaneously generating a massive volume of traffic from various sources. Upon the attacker's command, these botnets flood the target website or server with requests, causing it to crash under the excessive load.
Too much traffic can crash a website. I learned that hard lesson relatively early in my web development career. Web teams recoil in horror when they realize their own success has crashed their site. Remember when Coinbase spent millions of dollars on a Super Bowl commercial that successfully drove traffic to their site and app? Their infrastructure got run over.