Denial-of-Service Attack

This lesson discusses the denial-of-service attack.

A denial of service or DoS, attack is a type of attack in which the attacker tries to crash an application so that the legitimate users are not able to access the application. The attacker does not gain any benefit from this attack. The main purpose of this attack is to harm an organization, and is often carried out by a competitor or mischievous hacker.

The first DoS attack was done by 13-year old David Dennis in 1974. Dennis wrote a program using the external or ext command that forced some computers at a nearby university research lab to power off. ...

Types of Denial of Service Attacks