Denial of Service [DOS]

An attack that attempts to block access to and use of a resource. It is a violation of availability. DOS (or DoS) attacks include flooding attacks, connection exhaustion and resource demand. A flooding attack sends massive amounts of network traffic to the target overloading the ability of network devices and servers to handle the raw load. Connection exhaustion repeatedly makes connection requests to a target to consume all system resources related to connections, which prevents any other connections from being established or maintained. A resource demand DoS repeatedly requests a resource from a server in order to keep it too busy to respond to other requests.