Volumetric attacks -

Test your ability to withstand extreme and sustained attacks. Includes UDP floods and ICMP floods. The attack’s goal is to saturate the bandwidth of the attacked site, and magnitude is measured in bits per second (Bps).

Application-layer attacks 

 Send excessive HTTP/S GET or POST requests to test your resistance to resource exhaustion. Includes low-and-slow attacks, GET/POST floods, attacks that target Apache, Windows or OpenBSD vulnerabilities and more. Comprised of seemingly legitimate and innocent requests, these attacks aim to crash the web server, and the magnitude is measured in Requests per second (Rps) or Connections per second (Cps).

Protocol attacks -

Consume actual server resources, or those of intermediate communication equipment, such as firewalls and load balancers, and are measured in packets per second (Pps).

One group of DDoS attacks is called “Volumetric Attacks,” typically a flood of UDP or ICMP traffic.

In these attacks, the attacker sends a high volume of “garbage” traffic that has no meaning at the application or protocol level and serves only to saturate the Internet pipeline. Since these attacks use high bandwidth, blocking them on the server side will not be effective, as the pipeline is already congested. To effectively block this type of attack, we must have a mitigation machine on the Internet provider side, meaning the traffic must be blocked before it reaches our pipeline.

The second type of DDoS is Protocol attacks, usually TCP. These attacks typically have a high packet rate per second, though each packet is small. 

The last type in our list is an application-layer DDoS attack. In this attack, the attacker sends a high rate of requests to the target server – more than the maximum capacity.