Does a Content Delivery Network (CDN) protect against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks? It’s a good question. A CDN by its very nature will absorb DDoS attacks for the content that it serves and this could be considered protection but, as is often the case, this is only the beginning of the story.
If we consider what is actually going on here, the CDN isn’t actually ‘blocking’ the DDoS attack – it is simply reducing its impact by throwing more resources at the problem. This means that the size of the DDoS attack a CDN can deal with is inherently dependent on the size of the CDNs infrastructure, which for some of the market-leading players means that pretty much any current attack targeting CDN served content can be ‘absorbed.’