A week ago Friday, someone took down numerous popular websites in a massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack against the domain name provider Dyn. DDoS attacks are neither new nor sophisticated. The attacker sends a massive amount of traffic, causing the victim's system to slow to a crawl and eventually crash. There are more or less clever variants, but basically, it's a datapipe-size battle between attacker and victim. If the defender has a larger capacity to receive and process data, he or she will win. If the attacker can throw more data than the victim can process, he or she will win....
Continue reading: https://securityintelligence.com/lessons-from-the-dyn-ddos-attack/
Schneier, Bruce. “Lessons From the Dyn DDoS Attack.” Security Intelligence, November 1, 2016