Certified Incident Handler (CIH) Practice Ecam

In a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, the infected systems that target a single system are known as what?

1. Hackers

2. Agents

3. Servers

4. Zombies

The correct answer is: Zombies

In a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, the infected systems that are utilized to target a single system are commonly referred to as "zombies." These are individual machines that have been compromised and are under the control of an attacker. They typically form part of a larger network known as a "botnet," which consists of numerous zombies working together to overwhelm the targeted system with traffic or requests. The term "zombie" effectively captures the idea of these systems being used without the knowledge of their legitimate owners, much like a reanimated corpse being controlled by an external force. In the context of a DDoS attack, the goal is to flood the target with an excessive amount of traffic, making it unavailable to users. In contrast, hackers would refer to individuals who exploit vulnerabilities, while agents could imply software or processes that may not specifically relate to DDoS. Servers typically refer to systems that provide services or resources to other computers over a network and are not the compromised systems in the context of a DDoS attack. Thus, "zombies" is the correct term to identify the compromised systems in this scenario.