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Desktop virtualization company Citrix has faced a distributed denial of service (DDoS) cyberattack impacting some of its customers. Citrix said it is investigating the impact of the cyber attack on its application delivery controller (ADC) devices.

“Citrix is aware of a DDoS attack pattern impacting Citrix ADCs. As part of this attack, an attacker or bots can overwhelm the Citrix ADC DTLS (Datagram Transport Layer Security) network throughput, leading to outbound bandwidth exhaustion,” Citrix said in its threat update.

The company promised to release a fix in mid-January 2020.

A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack is when an attacker, or attackers, attempt to make it impossible for a service to be delivered. This can be achieved by thwarting access to virtually anything: servers, devices, services, networks, applications, and even specific transactions within applications. In a DoS attack, it’s one system that is sending the malicious data or requests; a DDoS attack comes from multiple systems.

Generally, these attacks work by drowning a system with requests for data. This could be sending a web server so many requests to serve a page that it crashes under the demand, or it could be a database being hit with a high volume of queries. The result is available internet bandwidth, CPU and RAM capacity becomes overwhelmed.