Can Tor be used to launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks?
Tor does not support the kinds of traffic (like raw UDP packets) that typical DDoS attacks rely on, and it does not amplify outbound bandwidth. Because Tor only transports correctly formed TCP streams on a one-for-one basis, it is not an effective tool for launching ordinary DDoS or bandwidth-amplification attacks.
Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks typically rely on having a group of thousands of computers all sending floods of traffic to a victim. Since the goal is to overpower the bandwidth of the victim, they typically send UDP packets since those don't require handshakes or coordination.
But because Tor only transports correctly formed TCP streams, not all IP packets, you cannot send UDP packets over Tor. (You can't do specialized forms of this attack like SYN flooding either.) So ordinary DDoS attacks are not possible over Tor. Tor also doesn't allow bandwidth amplification attacks against external sites: you need to send in a byte for every byte that the Tor network will send to your destination. So in general, attackers who control enough bandwidth to launch an effective DDoS attack can do it just fine without Tor.