Glossary

Denial of Service (DoS) attack

A Denial of Service (DoS) attack is a malicious attempt to disrupt the normal functioning of a targeted server, service, or network by overwhelming it with a flood of illegitimate requests.

This excessive traffic overloads the system, rendering it unable to respond to legitimate requests from users, effectively making the service unavailable.

There are different types of DoS attacks:

  • Flood Attacks: Sending an overwhelming amount of traffic to consume bandwidth or resources.
  • Crash Attacks: Exploiting vulnerabilities to crash the target system.
  • A more severe variant is the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, where the traffic originates from multiple compromised systems (botnets), making it harder to mitigate.

DoS attacks can lead to significant downtime, financial losses, and damage to an organisation's reputation. Mitigation strategies include using firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and load balancers, as well as employing traffic filtering and rate limiting to protect against such attacks.

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