Application L7 Denial-of-Service attacks
In February 2023 Sweden suffered a series of Distributed Denial-of-Service attacks (DDoS) and several Swedish websites were knocked down. A DoS is a type of attack that the attacker uses to make victim services unavailable, usually by sending large number of malicious requests. The number of incoming requests becomes so high that legitimate requests end up not being handled by the victim's services, thus the denial-of-service. DoS is also usually distributed in the sense that multiple bots (or zombies) and attacker-controlled machines take part in the attack to increase the probability of a successful attack. As reference, Cloudflare stated that it stopped a DDoS peaking 71 million requests per second in February 2023!