DDoS attacks aim to deny legitimate users of the services. In this paper, the authors introduce dual - level attack detection (D-LAD) scheme for defending against the DDoS attacks. At higher and coarse level, the macroscopic level detectors (MaLAD) attempt to detect congestion inducing attacks which cause apparent slowdown in network functionality. At lower and fine level, the microscopic level detectors (MiLAD) detect sophisticated attacks that cause network performance to degrade gracefully and stealth attacks that remain undetected in transit domain and do not impact the victim. The response mechanism then redirects the suspicious traffic of anomalous flows to honeypot trap for further evaluation. It selectively drops the attack packets and minimizes collateral damage in addressing the DDoS problem. Results demonstrate that this scheme is very effective and provides the quite demanded solution to the DDoS problem.