Distributed Denial of Service attack is a coordinated attack, generally performed on a massive scale on the availability of services of a target system or network resources. Due to the continuous evolution of new attacks and ever-increasing number of vulnerable hosts on the Internet, many DDoS attack detection or prevention mechanisms have been proposed.In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of DDoS attacks, detection methods and tools used in wired networks. The paper also highlights open issues, research challenges and possible solutions in this area.