You are correct a DDoS (Distributed Denial Of Service) is intended to take a target off line or simply slow down the target significantly (ideally making the se

You are correct a DDoS (Distributed Denial Of Service) is intended to take a target off line or simply slow down the target significantly (ideally making the service useless) While it is very unlikely to cause hardware damage it can be extremely damaging to a company or service. Service outages undermine customer trust and could drive users to your competitors. A company might also have a service level agreement with large financial costs associated with a service being down. If you don't mind the service being down, then why have it? It going down will probably have some very negative effect.