About
Denial of Service (DoS) is a category of network attack that consumes available server resources, typically by flooding the server with requests; the server is then sluggish or unavailable for legitimate users1.
Computers have limited resources, for example computation power or memory. When these are exhaused, the program can freeze or crash, making it unavailable. A DoS attack consists of various techniques these resources and make a server or a network unavailable to legitimate users, or at least make the server perform sluggishly.
Example
There are also Distributed Denial of Service (DDosS) attack 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; below 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
Anki
Links
References
MDN. “Denial of Service (DoS) attack”. Available at: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Denial_of_Service. (Accessed: ). ↩︎