What is a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack in the context of cyber security?

A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is a malicious attempt to disrupt the normal traffic of a targeted server, service, or network by overwhelming the target or its surrounding infrastructure with a flood of Internet traffic. Unlike a single Denial of Service (DoS) attack, a DDoS attack utilizes multiple compromised computer systems as sources of attack traffic, often referred to as a botnet, making it much harder to block and mitigate due to the distributed nature of the attack.