This is an important cyber security interview question. A Distributed Denial of Service or DDOS attack is an attack that results in servers refusing to provide services to authorized clients. This is one of the more common cyber threats used by bad actors to shut down an organization's IT infrastructure, causing disruptions in business and costing them great amounts of money. Hiring managers will want to ensure that you are familiar with these types of attacks and know how to implement preventive measures to stop them from occurring. This fundamental cybersecurity question is likely to be asked early in the interview to identify unqualified candidates.

"A Distributed Denial of Service or DDOS attack is an attack that results in servers refusing to provide services to authorized clients. DDOS attacks can be classified into two types. The first is a flooding attack in which the hacker sends a huge amount of traffic to the server, which the server cannot handle, causing the server to stop functioning. The second type of DDOS attack is a crash attack where the hacker exploits a bug on the server resulting in a system crash. Common ways to prevent DDOS attacks include using anti-DDOS services, carefully configuring firewalls and routers, and using front-end hardware to block the attack."

"Unfortunately, I have had to deal with many DDOS attacks during my career as a cyber security professional. I have encountered two types of DDOS attacks: a flooding attack and a crash attack. Flooding involves overwhelming the server with so much data that it shuts down. A crash attack inserts a bug into the server software that causes it to fail. Effective measures for countering these attacks include using anti-DDOS services, configuring firewalls and routers to recognize and repel the DDOS attacks, employing load balancing to manage excessive network traffic, and identifying spikes in external network traffic so that it can be rerouted or blocked."