What Is the Difference between a Volumetric and an Application-Layer DDoS Attack?

A volumetric DDoS attack attempts to overwhelm the pool's network bandwidth with a massive flood of traffic, like a SYN flood, making the service unavailable to legitimate miners. An application-layer DDoS attack targets a specific software layer (like the stratum server) with seemingly legitimate, but resource-intensive, requests, causing the server to crash or become unresponsive.

Volumetric attacks require higher bandwidth mitigation, while application-layer attacks require deeper traffic inspection.