During an application or Layer 7 distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, a bad actor or actors exploit weaknesses in the layer of a website that interfaces between human input and the site’s technical backend. In Layer 7, there are two protocols that are typically the focus of such attacks: Hypertext Transfer Protocol HTTP and Domain Name System (DNS).
In a DNS flood, an attacker can initiate a flood of seemingly legitimate DNS requests. According to Cisco, DNS can be considered the “foundation” of the internet. That’s because this layer acts as a sort of “phonebook” by translating human-language client application requests — such as rcrwireless.com — into IP addresses, allowing the user to navigate to the desired website.
