A Taxonomy of DDoS Attacks on Cloud Computing Environment and Approaches to Mitigation
Alok Kumar Pathak, Aarti Gautam Dinker, Sanjay Kumar Sharma · 2025
Modern businesses and Governments rely on Cloud Computing for offering Internet based services to their users as the cloud offers a Reliable and Secure hosting platform complying with the CIA triad of Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability. Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) is a threat to the availability pillar of the CIA triad which floods the infrastructure, network resources or websites with high volume of artificial traffic to overwhelm the Cloud resources preventing legitimate users from accessing the services leading to loss of revenue and reputation. As the attacks are distributed, the incoming flood of traffic appears to originate from numerous sources, making it practically impossible to deter the attacks by conventional methods of blocking source IPs. This article provides an overview of the impact and Taxonomy of DDoS attacks in the Cloud computing environment followed by various approaches for the identification of DDoS attacks and devising effective countermeasures for proactive mitigation of application layer attacks to secure the production environment from potential loss incurred towards service downtime.