Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks in the networks needs to be prevented or handled if it occurs, as early as possible and before reaching the victim. Dealing with DDoS attacks is difficult due to their properties such as dynamic attack rates, various kinds of targets, big scale of botnet, etc. Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is hard to deal with because it is difficult to distinguish legitimate traffic from malicious traffic, especially when the traffic is coming at a different rate from distributed sources. DDoS attack becomes more difficult to handle if it occurs in wireless network because of the properties of ad hoc network such as dynamic topologies, low battery life, multicast routing, frequency of updates or network overhead, scalability, mobile agent based routing, and power aware routing, etc. Therefore, it is better to prevent the distributed denial of service attack rather than allowing it to occur and then taking the necessary steps to handle it. This paper discusses various the attack mechanisms and problems due to DDoS attack, also how MANET can be affected by these attacks. In addition to this, a novel solution is proposed to handle DDoS attacks in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs).