These are often used against big companies. Hackers are increasingly gaining access to botnets composed of infected computers and IoT devices, as mentioned previously. Botnets are made up of computing or IoT devices that have been infected with malware to make them agents. These agents are controlled by handlers that hackers create to commandeer large numbers of bots. Handlers are the computers on the internet that bridge the communication between hackers and the agents. Owners of computers that have already been compromised and made agents might not know that they have bots:

To execute DDoS attacks, hackers instruct the handlers to send a command to all agents to send requests to a certain IP address. To a web server, these requests exceed its capabilities to reply and therefore it is brought down. The main aims for DDoS attacks are normally either to bring down a server or to create a diversion in order to commit another malicious act such as stealing data.