Wide Area Networks (WANs) are subjected massive Denial of Service (DoS) attacks known as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. There are many distributed computing use cases in the real world. They include banking, insurance, e-Commerce and a host of other applications. In distributed environments, these applications are targeted by adversaries for launching DDoS attacks of various kinds. Such attacks cause the servers to be very busy answering fake traffic from the compromised nodes used by attackers from behind the scene. Large number of computers over Internet are compromised by attackers and through such machines DDoS attack is made. The server machines that provide services to genuine users become victims of such attacks. Detecting DDoS attacks is difficult in the presence of flash crowds that resembles DDoS traffic. As there are different kinds of DDoS attacks, it is understood, from the literature, that there is need for further research to have a comprehensive framework for detecting different kinds of DDoS attacks. In this paper we proposed a hybrid approach for detecting various kinds of DDoS attacks and simulation study is made to have proof of the concept. The results of the experiments revealed that the proposed methodology is useful to detect DDoS attacks in wide area networks.