Topic summary
Distributed denial-of-service attack

Extracted from the Wikipedia article Denial-of-service attack.
Sophisticated low-bandwidth Distributed Denial-of-Service Attack
A sophisticated low-bandwidth DDoS attack is a form of DoS that uses less traffic and increases its effectiveness by aiming at a weak point in the victim's system design, i.e., the attacker sends traffic consisting of complicated requests to the system. Essentially, a sophisticated DDoS attack is lower in cost due to its use of less traffic, is smaller in size making it more difficult to identify, and it can hurt systems which are protected by flow control mechanisms.