DDoS protection comes with a wall of jargon. This Anti-DDoS glossary explains the terms you will actually run into as a server owner, in plain English - bookmark it and refer back whenever a word trips you up. For which games and protocols we filter specifically, see DDoS protection by game and application.
Quick answer
This Anti-DDoS glossary explains, in plain English, the terms server owners meet most: attack types such as UDP floods, SYN floods and amplification; the people and tools behind attacks such as botnets and booters; and the defences such as mitigation, scrubbing, XDP and GRE tunnels.
Attacks & attackers
- DDoS - Distributed Denial of Service: overwhelming a target with traffic from many sources so real users cannot connect. Full explainer.
- DoS - the non-distributed version, from a single source; far easier to block.
- Botnet - an army of hijacked devices controlled by one operator. More.
- Bot / zombie - a single infected device within a botnet.
- Booter / stresser - a rent-a-DDoS service; illegal to use against others. More.
- C2 (command-and-control) - the infrastructure a botmaster uses to direct bots.
Attack types & vectors
- Volumetric attack - a raw flood to saturate your bandwidth; measured in Gbps/Tbps.
- Protocol attack - abuses how TCP/IP works (e.g. SYN floods) to exhaust resources.
- Amplification / reflection - bounces small requests off other servers to multiply traffic at you.
- UDP flood - a flood of connectionless UDP packets, common against games and voice.
- SYN flood - half-open TCP connections that fill the connection table.
- Layer-7 / application attack - costly but legit-looking requests against panels and sites.
- Multi-vector - combining several of the above at once. Vectors explained.
Defence & mitigation
- Mitigation - the act of absorbing and filtering attack traffic so service stays up.
- Scrubbing - passing traffic through a filter that removes malicious packets and forwards the clean ones.
- Always-on protection - mitigation that runs continuously, not switched on after an attack starts.
- Filtering capacity - how much attack traffic a network can absorb, in Gbps or Tbps.
- Null-route / blackhole - dropping all traffic to an IP; stops the attack but also takes you offline (a last resort).
- Rate limiting - capping how many requests a source can make, used heavily against Layer-7.
- XDP / eBPF - Linux kernel tech that drops bad packets at line rate before the app sees them. More.
Networking terms
- Layer 4 / Layer 7 - transport-layer vs application-layer (from the OSI model). More.
- Gbps / Tbps - gigabits / terabits per second; the unit attack and filtering sizes are measured in.
- pps - packets per second; a flood of many tiny packets can hurt even at modest Gbps.
- Peering / IXP - direct network interconnections (e.g. at DE-CIX in Frankfurt) that cut latency. More.
- Latency / ping - round-trip time for data; what players feel as responsiveness. More.
- Jitter - variation in latency; the enemy of voice and fast-paced games.
- Packet loss - packets that never arrive; causes warps, rubber-banding and dropped audio. More.
Server & performance terms that show up alongside DDoS talk
- Tick rate - how often a game server updates the world per second; unrelated to DDoS but often confused with lag from an attack. More.
- Uptime - the percentage of time a service is reachable; what mitigation ultimately protects.
- Attack surface - everything exposed to the internet that could be targeted - ports, panels, IPs.
- False positive - legitimate traffic wrongly filtered as an attack; a sign of poor mitigation tuning.
You do not need to be a network engineer - but knowing these terms makes it far easier to spot a host that actually protects you from one that just says "DDoS protected".
How to use this glossary as a buyer
The fastest way to separate real protection from a marketing sticker is to ask a host to explain their setup using these exact words. A host that can tell you their filtering capacity in Gbps/Tbps, whether it is always-on, and whether they use kernel-level tools like XDP is describing a real system. A host that only says "we have DDoS protection" with no specifics is one to be cautious of.
Want the practical side rather than definitions? Start with how to protect your game server or see how our protection works.