DoS attack
Computers have limited resources, for example computation power or memory. When these are exhausted, the program can freeze or crash, making it unavailable. A DoS attack consists of various techniques to exhaust these resources and make a server or a network unavailable to legitimate users, or at least make the server perform sluggishly.
There are also Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attacks in which a multitude of servers are used to exhaust the computing capacity of an attacked computer.
Types of DoS attack
DoS attacks are more of a category than a particular kind of attack. Here is a non-exhaustive list of DoS attack types:
- bandwidth attack
- service request flood
- SYN flooding attack
- ICMP flood attack
- peer-to-peer attack
- permanent DoS attack
- application level flood attack
See also
- Denial-of-service attack on Wikipedia
- Denial-of-service on OWASP
- DDoS