What is a DNS flood?
A DNS flood is a type of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack in which the attacker targets one or more DNS servers belonging to a given zone, attempting to hamper resolution of resource records of that zone and its sub-zones.
How does a DNS flood work?
DNS servers act as the "phone books" of the Internet — they translate human-readable domain names into IP addresses. A DNS flood attack overwhelms a DNS server with an enormous number of requests, consuming the server's resources and preventing legitimate DNS queries from being resolved.
How is a DNS flood attack mitigated?
DNS floods can be mitigated through a combination of strategies including overprovisioning DNS infrastructure, deploying Anycast DNS across multiple data centers, implementing rate limiting on DNS queries, and using dedicated DDoS protection services that can distinguish legitimate DNS traffic from attack traffic.