As suggested by the name, this isn’t something that’s going to help your environment! A PoD attack is initiated by a malicious user sending a number of oversized IP packets to a host through a series of pings. The maximum size of an IP packet is 65,535 bytes. However, due to the fragmenting of the packets sent, when they are reassembled into a single packet on the host, they are larger than the allowed size. This manipulation causes the host to suffer from memory overflow detrimental to its performance.
So far, DDoS has been explained, as well as the general principles behind the attacks, but just bare knowledge about these attacks is of no use if we cannot do anything to stop them, right? Moving forward, let's focus on an AWS service that has been specifically designed to help protect your environment from DDoS threats, this being AWS Shield.