Which mitigation is commonly used to defend against Denial of Service (DoS) and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks?

• A. Code optimization
• B. Traffic scrubbing
• C. User authentication
• D. Data deduplication

Answer: (B)

Mitigating DoS and DDoS attacks hinges on cleaning the traffic before it reaches the target. Traffic scrubbing does exactly that: your inbound traffic is routed through scrubbing centers where malicious or anomalous packets are filtered out, and only clean, legitimate traffic is sent on to the destination. This approach is well suited to DoS floods, which overwhelm bandwidth or resources, because the scrubbing service can absorb and discard the excess malicious traffic at scale, then pass normal traffic through. With Distributed attacks, distributing and redirecting traffic to multiple scrubbers allows the defender to filter across a wide geographic and network footprint, reducing impact on the origin.

Code optimization focuses on performance of software, not on stopping harmful traffic floods. User authentication won’t help when attackers don’t need valid credentials or when floods attack availability rather than access control. Data deduplication improves storage efficiency, not network-layer denial of service.